Poop Costs Nothing
I hope you read that article I linked to covering the exchange of words between Gawker’s Ryan Tate and the renowned, Steve Jobs.
One of my favorite takeaways from that tiff was Tate ranting about all of that half-assed “apps” that besmirch the iTunes Store. Specifically, iPad magazines passing themselves off as “digital” when they are hardly more than tweaked PDF readers.
The line of thinking that leads to such poor products and user experience is highlighted in this quote I snagged from a Mashable article this morning regarding GQ’s whopping sale of 365 digital copies of the magazine.
“This costs us nothing extra: no printing or postage,” says Hunsinger. “Everything is profit, and I look forward to the time when iPad issue sales become a major component to our circulation.”
While there is a kernel of progressive foresight in that statement, it ignores that the lack of extra cost comes with a greatly diminished digital experience.
While I am no supporter of a tarted-up UX, after seeing Wired’s proposed digital magazine for iPad, I can argue that there is a definite value in tailoring content to the medium it is delivered in. This of course should be measured against user needs but in the same way that a website is different from a printed page, so is the digital equivalent.
The goal of any publication should be to deliver the best consumer experience possible, so while it may seem like a savings to cut-and-paste from one medium to the other, fitting a square peg into a round hole may not be a good long game plan.
