Time, Condé Nast, Hearst plan digital store: will there be any magazines left to sell?

Image by Tiago Rïbeiro via Flickr

Missed this yesterday with all the hubbub. The Financial Times reports that, basically John Squires of Time is leading a charge to create an iTunes store for magazines. “Publishers fear repeating the mistakes of the music industry,” the article says, “which delayed exploiting digital businesses until Apple created iTunes, now the world’s largest seller of digital music.”

Those are the writer’s words, but man oh man, it’s too late! This is Bertelsmann buying Napster late. The conversation long moved off of the printed page onto the web and magazines weren’t there to capture it. The time to do this right was when ad revenues were plentiful, not when they’re forcing closures of magazines. There’s simply no two ways about it. And the stated goal of the store is to keep content out of the hands of Apple and Amazon, whose stores for the iPod and Kindle are wildly successful. Which predicates that there’s going to have to be some kind of device unveiled to work with this new online magazine store.

There might be space in the e-reader segment for a new device, but quite frankly, that’s tighening up fast, to a three way race between Amazon, Sony, and whatever Apple puts out. Plastic logic already owns the late-game entry slot with its soon to launch Barnes & Noble Reader. The idea that Time et al are going to get their act together and launch a fifth device worthy of space in readers’ laptop bags isn’t so much laughable as completely unproven. They will have to move mighty fast to get there reader out there ahead of the big tech companies, and play flawlessly in tech, a space they are very unfamiliar with.

The store, I’m guessing, will run on Hearst’s top-secret e-reader. For a long time, the reader has not been publicly discussed by Hearst. Many took this to mean it was going to be the Jesus reader, capable of far more than anything on the market today. I’ve heard from multiple sources that it’s more the opposite– the reader is pretty ho-hum, and might not make the splash Hearst was hoping for, hence the low profile launch.

And finally, there’s the issue of content. With magazines closing left and right, what exactly is going to go on this device? The problem here is that, as usual, big businesses, in this case publishers, are assuming the consumer is going to care about the financial arrangement behind why they can only get Time on the Time magazine online store, and not on their Amazon Kindle.

Consumers don’t care.

They want their content on the device they like, with minimal hassle. That’s why Amazon created a Kindle App for the iPhone. The market was simply too big to ignore, competition be damned. If Amazon beats Apple, it will be because they let Kindle readers use the iPhone, not in spite of it. That’s how 21st century content distribution works– publishers don’t get to choose where readers can view their content: the readers do. The book industry has quickly come around to this, because they’ve been financial forced to. But despite what they told the FT, the magazine companies ignored the real lesson of the music industry ages ago–if they didn’t want to be at the mercy of Amazon and Apple, they needed to invent the iPod or the Kindle, and be the first to market with a consumer friendly e-reader. When the story written about your new product explains how it’s an alternative to a much more established and better product, created not for ease of use, but so that you can make more money, it might as well just read, ‘it’s already too late.’

FT.com / Media – Magazine publishers plan digital store.