jawfish

Print, Eyeballs, and Publishing
john posted in technologies on November 10th, 2005

On one of my favorite mailing lists the members tied themselves into knots today, fretting about how to get a series of back articles from a well-known motorcycle magazine. Forays into scanning musty old copies from boxes, and discursions into copyright law, eventually resulted in a plan to just buy the back issues. Knowing the publisher very slightly, I emailed him and asked if he could give the articles in digital form, and I offered my wiki as a place to put them. Through the course of a couple rounds of back-and-forth his position was essentially - I paid to get that content and every time I put it up on the Internet, even in pdfs, people steal it. Pointing out that few people will go to the trouble of breaking into a pdf, and that he could sell them for $5, got me nowhere.

At the same time my good friend returned from an Applescript conference, full of stories about how really big publications like the New York Times foresee a decline in print, and are planning a major push into Web sites. They won’t be pursuing subscriptions, they’ll depend on advertising revenue. Neither of us are businessmen, but I have always heard that newspapers barely cover delivery costs with their subscriptions, and the paper-printing costs are really a substantial part of their overhead. Not to mention the trees and streams. Web sites aren’t free, but the formatting work for paper is roughly like the formatting for the Web, web service is getting cheaper, and so there must be a very considerable saving in going all digital. Surely advertisers will follow the eyeballs, and they’ve little other choice: it’s radio or TV or the Web.

Recently the venerable New Yorker made its entire catalog available on eight DVDs, for about $70. Now, to a library, this is a darn good deal compared to $175 for another Jessica Mitford audio book. And there is some appeal to New Yorker fans, but $70? Then you find out the bad news. The thousands of articles, cartoons, covers are not available through a transparent medium like a web browser, or even the unlovely, but serviceable Adobe Reader. No, these massive DVDs come with a proprietary viewer. If you want to quote one, you have to re-type. If you run Linux, you are completely out of luck. I don’t know how good the search engine is, but its not Google. This article pretty well savages the whole thing, saying among other things that the Windows version won’t run at all without resetting your date formats, and the run times are excrutiatingly slow.

The point here is why they screwed up so badly- they were trying to keep people from copying. Anybody can throw a print New Yorker on a xerox machine or a scanner, and do what? Resell a newsprint knock-off? Pass it out to a class? Maybe it would bring a lot more eyeballs to their web site if they just forgot the stupid software they wrote, the dumb book that goes with it, and just posted the back issues. Nobody will steal and resell it if it’s already publicly available, and they might even get some extra advertising revenue. So what if some 10th grade teacher in Scarsdale copies it for her overhead slides, isn’t that free advertising for the magazine? Maybe some graduate student will write a thesis on Changing Mores in American Dipsomania: The New Yorker Cartoon in History? Heavens! Conde Nast bean-counters everywhere spill boullion on their laps.

My writing is more at the bike magazine level than the New Yorker, so when a perfectly good magazine fails to make articles accessible, it makes me think that I should just call up the original authors and ask if they’d like to recreate the information for the Web. If I, for instance, provide a library of useful stuff, those eyeballs will come to me, instead of to the magazine. Google already provides an elegant and unobtrusive ad service, and voila - I have a viable product. Best of all, its a product whose success depends on quality, not topicality or the latest fad.

Newspapers have already lost the classified business to various sites, and the now ubiquitous Craig’s List. Bloggers are taking away the editorial and news-bite traffic. Newspaper ads are trash. Every Sunday we get two huge papers at my house. The first thing I do with them is separate the ad pages, save the comics, and throw the ads in the recycle bin without looking at them. At least on the Web, when I am looking at an article about motor vibration patterns, I may actually look at the context-driven ad next to it for some arcane technical book on Amazon. If I click on the ad, Amazon will know exactly where I came from. Even if I don’t click, the page-view counter will record that somebody at least looked at the page. The advertisers are getting a much better deal on the web site.

In trying to protect the sanctity of their content, publishers are driving away the resource they need most - readers. Maintaining their intellectual beachhead is the best way to keep their readers, and access to their readers, not their content, is their saleable commodity. The advertisers who pay to keep all this running never know what happens to a print ad, but they do with interactive web ads. A drift away from print seems inevitable, and the publishers who understand the new medium will survive best.