Reed Business Information Australia launches a new tablet edition, SMSF Essentials, uses the Oomph platform

There was once a time when Red Elsevier's B2B divisions, Reed Business Information, were the giants in trade media world – especially in the U.S. after the acquisitions of the Cahners and Chilton groups. But those days are now fading in memory, at least here in the U.S.

But in Australia, Reed Business Information is still a powerhouse, though just last month came word that Reed would be selling off RBI Australia to a private equity firm Catalyst Investment Managers. Catalyst bought the B2B division for less than three times earnings, according to reports, reflecting both Reed's desire to dump its print properties, and the less than rosy future many feel B2B magazines will face.

Today, however, a new tablet edition for SMSF Essentials, which is not even a publication Reed lists among its titles. I assume it is tied to Money Management magazine, but the Reed websites are so slow that I simply can not get them to load. Whether this is the result of the divestiture is unknown.

But the tablet edition released today is excellent, which won't come as a surprise once you see that the app was developed by Oomph. Oomph is the technology division of Mogeneration, and TNM has looked at quite a number of their apps in the past, most recently in regards to the Coles app from ACP Custom Media.

Like most B2B titles, the publisher here has chosen to launch the app as free, and without any pre-qualification process built in. The download for the February issue found inside the library was lightning fast, both because the issue was only 30MB in size, but because of good server speed.

At 30 MB one might expect a replica edition, but the tablet edition is native, though simple in design. The layouts often use the same basic design, but it works very well – especially for a B2B publication.

This is the fourth tablet edition released into the Newsstand by Reed Business in Australia, and they all appear to be coming from the same group of financial magazines - Financial Planning, Money Management and Super Review being the others. Usually I catch new B2B magazine apps as they are released, it appears I am bit tardy when it comes to these app launches.

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Here is a very brief walk-through of the new SMSF Essentials app:

GIE Media's 'A Garden Life' gets some love from Apple, tablet-only magazine app featured in Newsstand

It may seem like a minor thing to a lot of media people, but for a B2B company to get their tablet magazine featured inside the iTunes App Store can be a big thing – it can be the break they were looking for.

Apple recently added A Garden Life to its New and Noteworthy selection of publication apps promoted in the iTunes App Store in the Newsstand category. A total of 34 magazine apps are currently being promoted, and the good news for GIE Media's app is that it is the tenth app listed, making it visible for many readers perusing the App Store.

The app is a bit special, GIE Media is, after all, known as a B2B magazine company, publishing such titles industry titles as Lawn & Landscape (see TNM post on the title's new native tablet edition).

What makes A Garden Life different is that it is targeted to the consumer market – plus it is digital-only. "We've been working on A Garden Life for the past year," Chris Foster, President and COO of GIE Media, told me recently.

"We decided that the only way for a B2B publisher to compete in the consumer magazine industry is to make a digital-only magazine, but we wanted to make it very engaging and very rich. So we used the Apple platform, because if you take a look at most of our downloads some 96 percent are on the iOS platform, the remainder are on Android or (Kindle) Fire or something else," Foster said.

The app for the digital magazine is universal, and the designers made sure that the iPhone edition was native, as well, not just a port over of the tablet design – taking a similar approach as BJPhoto.

I don't know if the decision to pursue native tablet editions influenced Apple's decision to help promote this particular magazine app, but it certainly can only help downloads. With no other consumer magazines to help promote the digital magazine, reaching readers can be difficult.

It may appear to be a minor thing, but any kind of promotion inside the Newsstand, especially with Apple's recent redesign that makes finding new magazine and newspaper apps even more difficult, can be a big boost for a publisher.

B2B publisher Macfadden releases its third tablet edition, new app for Grocery Headquarters continues Mag+ use

The B2B publisher Macfadden Communications launched its first tablet edition for one of its trade industry magazines in April of last year: Pizza Today was the first of what was to be roll out of its titles for the iPad (see TNM original post here).

The effort was, and is, being led by Michael Davis, director of digital services, and his team at Macfadden in New York. The goal, Davis told me last year, was to train the staff as they progressed. For the app for Pizza Today, which is published out of Louisville, Kentucky, Josh Keown was sent to NY to learn the Mag+ platform. "Josh is very savvy in this department," Pizza Today's editor Jeremy White told me when that tablet edition was launched.

In January of this year Macfadden launched its second tablet edition, this one for Beverage World, a 34,010 circulation B2B title (see TNM original post here).

Yesterday the newest tablet edition appeared for Grocery Headquarters, an industry leading trade journal with a circulation of 33,120 as of its last BPA audit.

Grocery Headquarters HD is a hybrid edition like the others – that is, the print ads appear here as they would in print, but the editorial pages have been reformatted for the iPad's display.

Like all the Macfadden tablet editions, the apps is free of charge to download, and the content can be accessed without charge, as well. For Macfadden the key issue simply is making the issues available to those who want to read their magazines on a tablet.

"Right now the key is that we've had enough people say to us that they want the magazine on an iPad and we're responding to that," Seth Mendelson, the publisher and editorial director told me yesterday. Issues such as tablet advertising will be considered later.

"Like everybody else in this business we feel that to some degree – to a large degree I'll say – is in the digital world."

Left: an article layout from the iPad edition; Right: the same page in print

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Grocery Headquarters is one of those B2B titles that makes into my own house every month – both because I used to publish a B2B food magazine and Grocery HQ was a competitor, and because my wife is in the grocery advertising business at a digital media company and needs to keep up with the news in the industry. Comparing the editorial page layouts in the new tablet edition with the print pages one can see that they are quite similar. The difference is that the layouts have been simplified quite a bit in the iPad editions, while font sizes have been increased making reading easier in this tablet edition than in the typical replica edition.

As is typical with hybrid tablet editions, the ads are not resized for the iPad. Because of the size of Grocery Headquarters this means the ad pages are a bit short for the tablet's display. To compensate, the iPad edition ads the magazine's logo at the top of the ad pages, which I think is a nice tough (see below-middle). For some reason, though, the cover was not reformatted for the tablet edition (as you can see below-left).

Another interesting decision was to make the two-page spreads able to be swiped. In most replica editions, and in most hybrids, as well, the reader goes from one half of the two-page spread to the other as if they were separate pages. Here, the reader can swipe to access a continuous image of the ad. It is a much better solution (which you can see below-right).

Morning Brief: Kickstarter launches iPhone app; did The Guardian's report on climate change think tank funders attracts paid commenters?; CNN's ship joy ride ends; Cygnus updates its line-up of B2B tablet editions

Short items for the start of the final day of the week:

I have always like the idea behind Kickstarter, the crowd funding website, but I've found it odd that so many say they have "chipped in a few dollars" to so many projects. Either these people are lying or they treat the funding site like the home shopping network, unable to pull themselves away from things. I've never tried a Kickstarter funding drive for myself, and with so many people saying TNM should launch a tablet edition maybe I should.

Yesterday Kickstarter launched an iPhone app, Kickstarter for iPhone, for those who simply have money burning a hole in their pocket I suppose. Or is the app for those with their own Kickstarter projects going? I don't know, but the app has been very well received by users, which only goes to show that the potential is limitless for new mobile and tablet applications.

The Guardian: Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks – The UK paper posted an investigative report on money behind the climate change denial think tanks (interesting that they would do "think tank" as one word). What followed was over 1,000 comments, most of which seem to be from climate change deniers. Is The Guardian planning a follow-up on the issue of paid commenters? Just an idea.

CNN played up the plight of Carnival cruise passengers stranded on a ship off the coast of Mexico. The ship took five days to finally dock at Alabama Cruise Terminal, three days behind schedule. That gave CNN time to get into gear to make this their lead story for most of yesterday into today. The Huffington Post had a lot of fun at CNN's expense, wondering if this was the type of journalism the cable news network would be pursuing in the future.

But The Huffington Post should talk. This morning the website is leading with a headline so large it might take at least two Macbook Airs to display it: METEORITE STRIKES, '500 UNJURED'.

Cygnus Business Information issued a series of app updates last night to tablet editions.

The B2B media company updated Firehouse Magazine, Law Enforcement Product News, Law Enforcement Technology, EMS World, Sustainable Construction, and Aircraft Maintenance Technology Magazine.

The updates are required because of issues that have arisen in apps built using the Adobe DPS since Apple launched iOS 6.1. Adobe describes the bug this way: "The recent release of iOS 6.1 exposed an issue with DPS viewers that have in-app purchasing enabled. This issue causes the viewer to crash when a network connection is not available. This includes situations where Wi-Fi or cellular network connections are not available, or when the device is in airplane mode."

ABM announces 2013 Neal Award finalists; categories remain light on digital, lacks tablet edition category

The ABM this morning announced their finalists for the 59th Jesse H. Neal Awards. The editorial awards are named after the B2B association's first managing director.

The Neal Awards remain very much a print centric contest, with only a couple categories directly pointing to digital. There is no category for tablet editions, for instance, or for e-newsletters, though one assumes that an editor could submit work in digital platforms for many of the categories.

One of the few digital categories is for Best Website which is broken out into three subcategories based on revenue. The finalists in the "Up to $3 million" category are ControlGlobal.com, 
Putman Media; GreenSourceMag.com, 
The McGraw-Hill Companies; Nextgov.com
, Government Executive Media Group/Atlantic Media Company; and PropertyCasualty360.com
, Summit Business Media.

The finalists in the $3-$7 million category are: AgWeb.com, Farm Journal Media; BizBash.com, BizBash; dvm360.com, Advanstar Communications; and FirefighterNation.com, PennWell Corporation.

In the more than $7 million in revenue category the finalists are: AmericanBanker.com, SourceMedia; ArchitectMagazine.com, Hanley Wood; ENR.com, The McGraw-Hill Companies; and NRN.com, Penton Media.

In the Best Blog category the finalists are: "BankThink", American Banker, SourceMedia; "Head in the Point Clouds", SPARPointGroup.com, Diversified Business Communications; "The Risk Factor", Spectrum.Ieee.org, IEEE Media; and "Paul Thurrott", Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows, Penton Media.

The Best Use of Mobile category finalists are: AgWeb News & Markets, AgWeb.com, Farm Journal Media; Plate Recipes, Plate, Marketing & Technology Group; Robots for iPad, IEEE Spectrum, IEEE Media; and Sustainable Construction, Sustainable Construction, Cygnus Business Media.

The full list of finalists with images can be found here. The winners will be announced at the Neal Awards ceremony on Tuesday, March 12, at Pier Sixty in NYC. This year there were 640 entries, of which 183 were selected as finalists.

Industry News: Impelsys releases iPublishCentral 4.1; Bazaarvoice completes integration of Longboard Media; IProduction releases new social login feature

When TNM first launched in 2010 this site was lucky to get 100 visitors in a day. Getting a press release sent to me was like a miracle, they actually know TNM exists? But now the readership is over 50K and far more diverse. In a blog formatted website it is nearly impossible to post short stories based on press releases that might be of interest to a group of readers – that is one big reason a redesign of this site is long over due.

But in the interest of bringing as much digital media news as possible I thought I'd clear out a few stories and give readers a chance to decide for themselves if they are interested in the stories you will see below. Each story is linked to a page which contains the full press release so that you can continue to learn more.

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iPublishCentral 4.1 Offers Enhanced Features for Reading eBooks on Mobile Devices

New Version of Digital Publishing Platform From Impelsys Improves Mobile Reading Experience and Gives Institutions New Tools for Managing eBook Subscriptions

Impelsys, a global leader in providing electronic content delivery solutions, today announced the release of iPublishCentral 4.1, the latest version of its award-winning digital publishing software for publishers.

iPublishCentral is a comprehensive platform that allows publishers to warehouse, deliver, distribute, market and sell their eBooks without making significant capital or engineering resource investments on their own. This means that publishers are able to quickly monetize their digital assets by selling eBooks to institutions, retail partners and directly to consumers.

The new release of the software includes a number of enhancements to the iPublishCentral Reader that make it easier to read eBooks and other digital content on-demand, from any location, on iPads, iPad minis and Android-powered mobile devices. These features enable publishers to better serve the needs of their retail and institutional customers for mobile access to eBooks. (read more)

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Bazaarvoice, Inc. Completes Integration of Longboard Media and Creates Bazaarvoice Media Labs

Bazaarvoice, Inc. a leading social and e-commerce software company, today announced that it has completed the integration of Longboard Media, which was acquired in November 2012, into its Bazaarvoice Media business unit. Bazaarvoice also announced the creation of Bazaarvoice Media Labs, a research and development group focused on translating the company's audience reach, social content and market data into new products and services that can help advertisers to better target consumers and increase revenue through multiple online channels.

The expansion of Bazaarvoice Media strengthens the company's ability to deliver a comprehensive set of products and services that bring highly relevant branded media to consumers, whenever and wherever they shop online. Bazaarvoice Media's advertising management network enables site publishers to easily launch and manage on-site advertising campaigns that help brands increase reach, awareness and relevancy in the digital shopping aisle.

Meanwhile, advertisers can target customers by behavior, product, location and demographic through a broad shopping network that reaches an estimated 100 million active consumers through shopping comparison sites, mobile commerce applications and online retailer sites.

"Successfully courting today's digitally savvy shoppers and turning them into loyal, long-term patrons requires an understanding of what they want, when and where they want it," said Jim Barkow, general manager, Bazaarvoice Media.

"Advertising is being transformed to enable brands and retailers to not only provide information that helps consumers make a more informed purchase decision, but also to connect with them on all devices they use while researching products online or shopping in-store." (read more)

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Via New Social Login Feature, B2B Publishers Amplify Audience Data

Proven publishing system responds to customer demand with B2B social login feature

An increasing number of B2B publishers are offering social login options to their subscribers, as evidenced by the recent release by a leading Internet publishing system of an integrated social login feature.

IProduction released its new social login feature in late January, in response to customer demand. The new social login feature works with leading CMS systems WordPress and Drupal as well as with IProduction's proprietary CMS. (read more)

Morning Brief: Condé Nast continues issuing updates to fix bug introduced in iOS 6.1; Trade publisher SGC launches its own web services company

While publishers who use the Adobe DPS continue to issue fixes to bugs introduced with Apple iOS 6.1, Apple itself is trying to fix issues with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 which have forced Microsoft to recommend blocking devices running iOS 6.1. Apple has already issued an update for iPhone 4S users, but a general update of the mobile operating system appears to be needed.

Condé Nast continuing issuing updates to its magazine line-up, the latest apps updated include Vanity Fair and GQ. The publisher still has more titles to go.

TED Conferences, which just recently updated its universal iOS app has had to issue an update already to fix an issue where the app crashes on iPhones when laying videos in landscape – in other words, the way most people would play them. The last update to TED introduced subtitles, as well as speed improvements.

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B2B magazine publisher Scranton Gillette Communications/SGC Horizon has launched its own web services company, MediaPress Studios. The publisher of such trade industry magazines as Water & Wastes Digest and Building Design+Construction will sell web development services to its client base, as well as content strategy, search engine optimization strategies.

"We recognized a growing need among our clients to have a single resource for all their marketing needs. At SGC/SGC Horizon, we house the editors and designers who are steeped in our clients' industries, along with custom project, videography and audience-development divisions. Closing the loop by adding revenue-generating, web-development services inclusive of content strategy and SEO is a natural progression," said Ed Gillette, SGC president and CEO in the company's announcement.

"Three years ago, we discovered Drupal and aligned our web strategy to its solid framework," said MediaPress Studios Principal and SGC Senior Vice President of e-Media, Joel Hughes. "Our goal from the beginning has been to build fully responsive, device-independent websites for tomorrow. Our clients responded to the new look and capabilities of our brands' websites. Now we look forward to offering the same services to our clients and providing training, SEO services and content strategy to ensure that their websites remain fresh and relevant."

Disclosure: I served as publisher of two B2B magazines at SGC in the mid-nineties to 2000.

B2B publisher launches new digital trade publication; designs tablet edition and online flipbook in the form of a print magazine, right on down to the fonts and layouts

Imagine for a minute that you have been given a task to create a sign for, say, a garage sale. You buy a giant piece of cardboard and a few magic markers and you give them to an artist. An hour later they come back and give you the sign: a giant piece of cardboard with a small line of text drawn in the upper right hand corner saying "Garbage Sale". You ask the artist "you had the whole sheet of cardboard to make the sign, why did you just use a small portion of the canvas?" They reply "because a book is not as big as this piece of cardboard, so I designed for the size of a book."

Would that make any sense to you? Yet each month publishers release tablet editions that are designed for the size of a print magazine then shrunk down. But worse, sometimes you see a publisher design a "digital magazine" based on the size of print. It boggles the mind makes you weep for the state of our industry.

Today I downloaded Residential Building Products and Technology, a brand new digital-only magazine that appears to have been designed for print, then converted into a Flash flipbook for online reading, and a new universal iOS app for reading on an iPad or iPhone.

Yes, that is the cover you are seeing at left, it does not fit the display of the iPad. It looks much sillier on the iPhone, believe me. As for the articles, again they were designed for the one platform that will never appear on: print. Why would someone do that? As for the online version, it is exactly the same, designed for print. Reading it online or on the iPad requires pinch-to-zoom to have a chance at being able to read it. On the iPhone, well, if you set your document to use fonts that are less than 1pt in size you will get an idea of the experience.

As for the articles, here at right is a product review page where the product photos have numbers next to them. On a real digital magazine, one designed for the tablet, one would tap the numbers and the captions would appear. Here, as in print, the numbers refer to text captions found elsewhere on the page. You'll also see that the pages are numbered as in a print magazine, with even numbers to the left and odd numbers to the right.

We can laugh, we can make fun of things like this. But, really, this is not funny. Ultimately a company will go out of business and people will lose their jobs over this kind of publishing. This is most certainly not funny.

My guess is that the reason the publisher (name withheld because there is no reason to pile on) did this is that they were really designing for Nxtbook's idea of a digital magazine – those Flash-driven flipbooks that replicate print, only at a fraction of the size, and with that fake page-turning sound built in. The apps, I would guess, were thrown in (please, I hope they didn't pay for them).

My advice, if offered, would be to dump the flipbook, dump the app, and start over. The property's website is attractive, but I see it is completely devoid of advertising. One can tell that this is a company that feels very comfortable with print, but not at all with digital.

Of all the stories I write here at TNM ones like this can be guaranteed never to be forwarded or retweeted by the publisher or the various magazine trade associations. But I hope they are read, nonetheless.  For every really fantastic tablet edition, such as the new ones released by GIE Media recently, or the innovative ones coming out of Europe, there are these digital products that don't stand a chance of success. We can do better, we really can.

Dutch medical app has qualification process that could work for B2B publishers (assuming Apple does not object)

Without a doubt one of the biggest questions B2B publishers involved in tablet editions must deal with is the fact that there is no built-in qualification process for the platform – no way to limit readership of a B2B magazine in digital to just those  in the industry covered by the editorial content of the digital magazine. In print, a publisher only mails their qualified circulation magazine to readers who have filled out a reader response card – giving their name, address, title, company name and other business information to the publisher.

What most publishers and developers have believed is that Apple would not allow an app into the App Store or the Newsstand that forced a reader to be qualified before they could access the content of the digital magazine. As a result, most publishers have launched their tablet editions (or smartphone apps) as free apps, with the content freely available to anyone who downloads the app. A few publishers have gone the paid route, forcing readers of the digital magazine to pay a subscription charge. And still another, though smaller, group of publisher have made their apps "reader" apps, where the reader must sign into their existing accounts before accessing the content.

Until yesterday afternoon I'd not seen an app that contained its own qualification mechanism. That changed with MedZine.

MedZine has been around since last summer, but a new updated app was released a couple of weeks ago. Whether this app has had a qualification form inside it from the beginning I do not know. But I asked a couple of B2B publishers about this and they were stunned to learn of the app's qualification mechanism.
Left: the questions the reader must answer before gaining access to the app's content; Right: if the reader does not qualify this message appears.

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This is how this app works: you download and open the app. The app opens to a page that reads "I am a healthcare professional in..." and two choices are presented – The Netherlands or Other country. If the reader selects "The Netherlands" they are taken to a page where they fill in their information based on the medical society they are a part of. In this regards, they are sharing their information with the publisher, but it is also very much like the "reader" app model I described above.

But if the reader chooses another country, then the app takes you to a qualification page where the reader must toggle a switch that says they are a healthcare professional. They then specify what country they are from, their specialty and then their email address. If they do all this they gain access to the app.

This is, in essence, a qualification process. Sure, the reader has not given out their name and address, but the information gathered is plenty to qualify the reader as someone in the industry being served by the magazine (in this case, the medical profession).

Does this app violate Apple's developer guidelines? Apparently not. Did it slip through by mistake? Who knows. Frankly, I see nothing wrong with the app and its qualification mechanism. But as I've argued for the past three years both the ABM and BPA should be on top of this issue with Apple – a lot of publishers are wondering if there is a way to do a qualified circulation tablet magazine inside Apple's ecosystem.

Maybe the answer all along has been "Yes".

B2B publisher GIE Media committed to building native tablet editions, finds reader engagement dramatically higher than flipbooks, or even print magazines

This morning TNM posted its first look at the new tablet editions released by B2B publisher GIE Media for its Golf Course Industry and Lawn & Landscape industry titles. Both new apps use the Adobe DPS platform to create native tablet editions that not only reformat the editorial content of the magazines, but also includes some interactive advertising, as well.

The new B2B apps are very impressive and quite a bit ahead of what most other U.S. B2B publishers are doing today. But the first native app released by GIE Media was not a B2B title at all, but a digital-only consumer magazine, seen here last May, A Garden Life.

"We've been working on A Garden Life for the past year," Chris Foster, President and COO of GIE Media, told me late this morning.

"We decided that the only way for a B2B publisher to compete in the consumer magazine industry is to make a digital-only magazine, but we wanted to make it very engaging and very rich. So we used the Apple platform, because if you take a look at most of our downloads some 96 percent are on the iOS platform, the remainder are on Android or (Kindle) Fire or something else."

Now GIE Media is releasing native apps for their biggest titles – in addition to the two landscape industry magazines PCT - Pest Control Technology Magazine has its own native tablet edition.

"We went through all the growing pains and learning curve with "A Garden Life"," Foster said. "People engage in the native app versions of magazines so substantially more than they engage in flipbook apps. We see engagement of roughly 47 minutes per entrance into the app, which is huge."

"It's probably more than you see with print magazines, and the average person is going into the app several times during a month."

All together, GIE Media has 17 apps now inside Apple's App Store, though many of them are really just flipbook apps. "The flipbook apps don't give you that kind of measurement, and frankly are just not very engaging, so people go in they read an article and they pop out. So we made a decision to move away from Texterity, which was the majority of flip book apps that we had until this year," Foster said.

GIE Media appears very committed to building their own digital publishing products, which a big reason why the company decided to go with Adobe's solution rather than an outside vendor or a plug-in solution.

"We have an internal web design group and right now we are doing PCT - Pest Control Technology Magazine, Lawn & Landscape and Golf Course Industry in native versions, so we have three, in addition to A Garden Life. So the design teams are separate, and we're looking at how we could potentially merge those groups to expedite the design process now. We probably won't be able to do that for the next three to six months but we're looking at how that might work – because people who do native magazines, they're very good at native, they love animation, they get the metrics, they get how the page should lay out on a tablet. Traditional designers, though they may do a lot with web, they are still very print focused."

GIE Media's three B2B titles with native tablet editions

Like most B2B publishers, GIE Media will have to grapple with the issue of what to do about qualified circulation and their BPA audits. GIE Media has maintained the audits on their large magazines, and the audit for Lawn & Landscape, for instance, even includes information on its digital editions and their e-newsletters. But this may have to change in order to keep up with the changes in digital publishing.

"To start with BPA does have some methods to qualify BPA circulation, but they aren't very good," Foster told me.
"I want people to do that to my ad," says print advertiser about interactive ads
"The reality is you are operating in a world that is changing very quickly, and its changing faster than independent, say, battleship organizations can manage. If you want to tell a marketing story BPA is a great tool, but really that starts with leads. If you are bringing your advertisers good leads, regardless of how BPA displays it on a piece of paper, they (the advertisers) are going to want to do business with you. So we are looking at how we can tie the iPad circulation to an audit, whether that ends up being a BPA, or an independent verified audit, or even a publisher's statement is an issue we also talking about. But BPA needs to do some things to keep our business."

Read More >

B2B publisher GIE Media releases new, native tablet editions for Golf Course Industry and Lawn & Landscape

Native tablet editions from B2B to publishing companies from the U.S. are a rarity (Cygnus Business Information and Macfadden have a few), but a native tablet edition where the ad team has made a solid effort to attract some interactive advertising is even rarer – consumer or B2B. That is why the new stand-alone apps from GIE Media for the industry publications Golf Course Industry and Lawn & Landscape deserve to be recognized.

Lawn & Landscape is a 70,000 circulation BPA-audited magazine that also audits its digital edition, raising the circulation of the magazine to over 74K. The title also includes its e-newsletters inside its BPA audit statement, giving it a total reach of over 256,000. In other words, the GIE Media team is well ahead of where many other B2Bs are today. (Golf Course Industry is a trade magazine with 25,289 in circulation and a more traditional looking BPA audit.)

An older app for the horticultural group exists in the App Store, but these newly released apps are miles ahead of that early effort.

Pat Jones is the publisher of both titles and my hope is that I will be able to speak to him and members of his team later today or later this week to discuss these apps more. But the important thing to repeat is just how different, and better these tablet editions are than most other B2B digital magazines. Indeed, while GIE Media has other magazine titles inside the App Store, the ones I have seen, such as for Nursery Management and Greenhouse Management, are little more than app shells that give the reader access to a digital flipbook built by 3D Issue. The only purpose for those digital flipbooks, I've found, is to make it easier for publishers of competitive magazines to keep track of who is advertising with GIE Media. Readers, on the other hand, will find them impossible to read.

These apps, officially GCI-Golf Course Industry and Lawn & Landscape magazine, do not use Apple's Newsstand so readers will have to download the issues manually. This allows the apps to have their own stand-alone icons, but the trade off is that a reader will have to allow for push notifications to guarantee the new issue gets downloaded.

Like many other B2Bs who have entered the App Store, GIE Media has decided to allow anyone to download these issues for free. This is a tough call for qualified circulation magazines. In the print world, a reader would have to fill out a bingo card in order to prove they are part of the industry being covered by the magazine. That qualifies the reader to receive the magazine free of charge. All others would be forced to pay for their subscription. In the late nineties many B2B publishers made a push for paid circulation to supplement their qualified circulation, but that idea seems to have died.

With tablet editions, most B2B publishers have opted to simply open up their magazine to anyone. The problem with this is that one does not know how many of these new digital edition readers would be considered qualified readers to advertisers. For now, however, most publishers feel it is enough that their issues are available in digital form and their first apps are, in any case, seen as early experiments with the platform.

While I've downloaded and looked at all the GIE Media apps, I've created a walk-through video of the new app for Lawn & Landscape. The January issue inside the app weighs in at 223 MB, which is pretty modest considering the app appears to have been created using the Adobe DPS.



The tablet edition seen in the video above makes for an interesting comparison to the magazine's competitor, Landscape Management, published by North Coast Media. That app was created by RR Donnelley and is little more than a digital flipbook. Whatever advantage that B2B title had by entering App Store early was mitigated by the ill-advised decision to go with a replica edition built by their printer.

There are even more B2B magazines in the landscape industry category, believe it or not. Randall-Reilly has Total Landscape Care, though that company has not produced any tablet editions to date. There is also Landscape & Irrigation, a title that, in the interest of full disclose, I once served as publisher on.

End of the week media app wrap-up: first tablet edition for B2B title CFO Magazine; more iOS 6.1 related app updates from media properties using the Adobe DPS

Few qualified circulation B2B titles have as large a readership as CFO, the ten time per year magazine published by CFO Publishing out of Boston, Mass. At 443,219 in its last BPA audit statement, it is quite a monster of a magazine, its readership split into three parts: those who are actual CFOs or have similar titles, those who are in executive management, and other financial and operations personnel.

Today the B2B title launched its first tablet edition, using Tapedition to create the Newsstand app. CFO Magazine The result, as with most (if not all) Tapedition apps is a replica edition, and quite a hefty one at that - the issue inside this app is 666 MB, maybbe the biggest replica I've come across.

Swiping through the issue inside, the January/February issue, I'm at a loss to understand why it is so large, though the pages (just images) do render slowly, so maybe this is an optimization issue.

Tapedition apps appear under the name of the publisher (yeah) as they require that you get a developer license (only $99 per year, simple process, do it), then the company charges a flat $499 a month fee, with a $199 per month option for Android. The company also offers a $999 one-time fee option if you want to offer your magazine free to your current subscribers, one of the few vendors I've seen to offer this service publicly.

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I have a feeling that a large number of TNM readers were well aware of why so many media apps have been updated since the introduction by Apple of iOS 6.1 – I just wish someone would have dropped me a line to tell me!

Today, for instance, the Denver Post's tablet magazine, Denver Post Colorado Ski Guide (TNM original post here), PowerSource from Santee Cooper (TNM post on the excellent new digital magazine here), and Rogers Publishing's B2B title Marketing Magazine (TNM original post here), all were updated today and list iOS 6.1 as the reason.

The reason for the large number of updates, as I guessed, involves Adobe DPS. This notice appeared on the Adobe website about a week ago:

The recent release of iOS 6.1 exposed an issue with DPS viewers that have in-app purchasing enabled. This issue causes the viewer to crash when a network connection is not available. This includes situations where Wi-Fi or cellular network connections are not available, or when the device is in airplane mode. All viewers built with release 24 and earlier of the DPS tools are affected and will crash when a network connection is not available. Release 25 viewers are unaffected. Single Edition applications, regardless of release, are unaffected.

We have released a hotfix, now available through DPS App Builder, to resolve this in release 24 viewers. Customers who have live apps in the app store with release 24 or earlier should re-build their applications to release 24 or 25 with DPS App Builder and re-submit the viewer to Apple for approval.

So far, at least other digital publishing platforms have not reported any specific issues with iOS 6.1, which is why we're not seeing updates across the board on those apps.

"We're not seeing any issues there yet. All of our apps seem to be working fine out of the box on 6.1 without an update," Mag+’s Chief Product Officer Mike Haney said.

B2B: Existing digital publishing platforms don't give B2B publishers very attractive choices when launching their first tablet editions

More and more B2B tablet editions and stand-alone apps are appearing in Apple's App Store these days as the era of experimentation continues. Some publishers, such as Cygnus Business Media, have taken leadership roles by launching new apps fairly regularly, while others either outsource their efforts, or continue to opt out – at least for now. One of the biggest issues continues to be choosing a digital publishing platform that will be appropriate for their publications.

One option remains outsourcing the app development. Landscape, the Journal of the Landscape Institute has gone this route.

The Landscape Institute is a UK organization for landscape architects and the organization has chosen to bring in CoCreate Design & Marketing, a UK web design and marketing agency to build their first tablet edition for their magazine.

Unfortunately, the results are less than satisfactory. What the app delivers is simply a replica edition that presents the print magazine as a missized tablet edition – the print pages don't really fit the screen of the iPad. But much worse is the fact that the organization's pride and joy, its magazine, is now sold under the developer's name inside Apple's Newsstand. This loss of control goes down to the app description that is limited to one sentence, and to screenshots that don't really show much.

For many trade associations with their own publications, building out digital publishing capabilities really is not an option. If the association is currently doing the production and editorial work in-house, the move to digital is a sign of danger for the staff, knowing that outsourcing the magazine might become an attractive option down the line. For custom publishing firms, however, strong digital publishing skills can prove to be a good way of attracting new business – not only from trade associations, but from brands looking to launch their own first tablet apps. The world of mobile and tablet publishing, therefore, looks a lot like the first days of Internet publishing did in the late nineties, with new players coming in to pick off new customers.
Cygnus Business Media continues to be one of the few B2B publishers actively experimenting with tablet editions. Experimenting, I believe, is the right word, because many of their apps feel like efforts to see what will work, what will attract readers, and what the company can do on its own.

Near the end of the year one of its titles, Feed & Grain, released its first iPad app for its Feed & Grain 2013 Equipment & Service Guide.

The B2B title is a BPA-audited trade magazine with 15,706 readers in its last statement. Published only 7 times per year, this is an interesting title to look at in terms of the new digital platforms. Few industry journals of this size have launched anything inside the App Store.

The new app most like was created using the Adobe DPS Single Edition solution as the app does not support Newsstand and is free of charge for readers. The size of the download, 661 MB, would lead one to think that the resulting digital publication would be one of those giant sized buyers guide some B2B publishers used to produce once a year during the heyday of the industry. It's not, the app is a moderately sized digital product with a single sponsor, Sweet Manufacturing.

I enthusiastically applaud the experiment here, even if the results seem to not hit the mark. To produce so huge a digital file for so little content shows the limitations of the digital publishing solution. Nonetheless, Cygnus now has 16 iPad apps available, which is way more than most B2Bs. But the apps are stuck in a rut - similar looking landscape formatted tablet editions that don't always serve the magazines very well.

It is possible that a move to another platform, such as Mag+ or Aquafadas (or something else) could provide a different perspective. After all, the goal here should be to create a tablet edition that will attract industry readers wanting a digital publication each month. But if the company is committed to the Adobe DPS then there is no doubt that the platform is versatile enough to produce digital magazine different than those created so far. Keeping file sizes down, though, will continue to be a challenge.

3) Evaluating media properties: New Media pros look at legacy titles as starting points for new digital publications

The client list may seem the same as "the database" and it is, of course, related. But it is also different because the client list is a very small subset of the database of prospects.

I find that many publishers do a poor job of understanding what their own current list of advertisers says about their magazine and how the readers look at the title.

A New Media pro that can look at the current list of advertising clients and understand what is going on has a leg on if they end up acquiring the property or its assets. Let me explain:

Take two seemingly identical magazines, with seemingly identical readerships. In one magazine the ads are dominated by one kind of client, while the other has a completely set of advertisers. This happens more often than you might think and is generally caused by the way each publisher is looking at their markets. One might be positioned as a design book, while the other is a construction book – both are reaching the designers, but where one targets software and services, the other is targeting the products that the designer specs into their designs.

Looking a magazine (or website) and seeing a pattern can be helpful in evaluating the potential growth of a property once it becomes digital only. Sometimes a publishers concludes that their market is shrinking and getting out now is a good idea. THEY MAY BE RIGHT (which is something digital folk sometimes have a hard time accepting). But they may also be looking at the market wrong. Matching up that client with the advertising database may be helpful here.

There are many other area where a prospective buyers might want to evaluate a property, but the existing staff is surely an important one. Most shuttered properties have laid off their staffs or moved them to other properties. The availability of talent needs to be assessed and the publisher can always decide to start from scratch. But collective knowledge of a market is a fundamental principal of good B2B publishing.

Yet how many B2B titles, once shuttered, have fallen into the hands of new publishers who think they know their industries, but start their ventures with no one on staff who has either worked directly in the industry or on the trade magazine title in the past.

Before they exited the B2B market in the U.S., RBI uses to recruit editors with a standard recruitment ad. At no point in the ad did the copy mention the industry the B2B magazine was in, or whether experience in the industry they were going to cover mattered. Many B2B editors are moved from book to book, only learning anything about their industries when they attend trade shows. Is this the state of the property on the market? You need to know up front.

It won't surprise many to learn, though, that I care more about the condition of the ad staff. As I used to say, a lot, no problem can not be overcome with a new full page ad. More revenue has a healing effect. It is often the case that when a property is shuttered the editors are let go and the ad staff reassigned. But many times the rep is just as tied to their books as the editors. Even if an ad salesperson is repping multiple books, it is sometimes the case that the shuttered property represented the majority of their revenue. That person may be very open to joining your new digital venture.

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Finally, as I told that reader who asked for my advise, I can not overestimate the importance of proper due diligence. The M&A industry depends on buyers doing bad due diligence – don't be a victim. After an initial agreement to buy a property or its assets, set aside enough time before the deal is closed to property evaluate the property further.

Of course, the best due diligence is that which takes place before the offer is extended. But if you don't allow yourself an escape if things are not as they first appeared, then you will be taken to the cleaners.

The best first step is to create a new P&L for your property. What are you really looking at in the next 12 months. The creation of this first P&L will force you to address new issues that may not have come up in the excitement of the purchasing process. I have been lucky enough to have been involved in a number of new acquisitions. But it was the acquisitions we didn't make that were always the best moves. Staring a new P&L for a property that will bleed red ink has prevented many a bad acquisition. Even if the New Media pro is only buying the reader list of a shuttered property, knowing what they really are getting might save them a lot of money, or drive down the ultimate sales price.

2) Evaluating media properties: New Media pros look at legacy titles as starting points for new digital publications

The list: Most B2B titles are qualified circulation magazines that mail their publications to a set list free each month. In the past, a publisher might start a new B2B magazine simply because they felt they had in their possession a good list of those in the industry – the rest, they felt was easy. Give a publisher a good list of readers and the rest of the job was simply hiring editors and sales people and start publishing.

Today, publishers often try and save their magazines by cutting circulation costs, starting with dropping their BPA audits and leading to ending their qualification process. Although there are costs to auditing a magazine, the real costs are in the qualification process. In the past, circulation managers depended on sending out mailings to readers to get them to fill out those "bingo" cards and mailing them back in. If the manager could get a good percentage to respond to that first mailing then they could limit their efforts from there – usually more mailings and faxing.

Today the cost is in telemarketing efforts. Killing the qualification process means thousands of dollars in savings, but it also means that the list – that is, the database of subscribers – is getting stale.

A magazine that has just recently dropped their BPA probably still has a good list. But anything over two years or so is stale.

But there is more to it that just the "freshness" of the list, there is also its quality. In the nineties, most B2B sales forces competed with each other not only over who reached the most qualified readers, but what readers were more qualified than others. A construction magazine might ask for information on the reader's job title in their company, but did they ask how big the company is, what their sales volume is, and what that reader was authorized to design, buy or specify? Some BPA audits were as big as their magazines (OK, I exaggerate a little), while others were four pages of very general data. The four page audit is the standard today, I'm afraid to report.

When TNM first started publishing, Reed Business Information was shuttering a series of magazines. Many of these titles couldn't find buyers before they were shuttered. But these titles still had good lists of readers and when buyers emerged to pick off the remnants those buyers generally found that their properties were in better shape than they could have otherwise expected.

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The database: this is one area where I admit to having a bit of a fetish. For me, as a B2B publisher, I felt that one of the most important things I needed to have in my possession was as complete a database of advertising leads as possible.

Often I would come into a situation where next to nothing was in the possession of the publisher and would have to begin the process of building it myself, often by getting information from the sales reps. They hated that. Many ad reps felt that I wanted that database so I could make them expendable. Wrong. For me, the database was where our sales efforts began, and where my own efforts to help the staff started.

As time wore on, most publishers started to depend on the competitive analysis companies who counted ad pages and gave the publishers market share data. Then came the database solutions: ACT!, for instance; later Salesforce.com and others.

Most New Media pros looking at several properties will find the databases in the widest imaginable condition (? I'm not sure I said this well). A major publisher, say one of the top ten media companies, probably have moved their reps onto a system such as Salesforce.com. Getting access to that database is essential, of course, but could be complicated by the publishing group the property belonged to. That is, the publisher may consider this data proprietary because it also applies to other titles they own.

Asking for sample entries is always a good idea. Gaining the market share reports, in detail, is also a good idea. Being able to combine them yourself puts you way ahead.

But how good is this information? Ah, there's the rub. Often it is not so good. Horrible, in fact. Part of the problem is that a New Media may be looking at the market in a very different way than the previous publisher.

A good story to tell might be when I move to Chicago to take over a B2B property. That legacy title saw itself as competing against the big construction equipment magazines. I didn't see things this way. As someone who had experience with regional construction companies, I looked at things from the reader's perspective, not the big advertiser's perspective. I knew that contractors bought a wide range of products, of which construction equipment was just the most obvious.

So when I saw the database of advertising leads I quickly noticed that it really only reflected at best one quarter of the companies I felt we should approach. This new way of looking at the market gave our reps a tremendous advantage – yes, they had to make lots of cold calls, but every time we landed a new client in a new part of the industry we saw that we have a very large share of their budget. We continued to go after out small share of the equipment market, but over time equipment advertising became less important and as a result the magazine found itself on firmer footing that it had in the past.

In the new world of mobile and tablet publishing platforms, where some new ventures believe they can make a go of it on reader revenue, the database might not appear to be a big concern. But then again, if I were entering the market I'd want to go head to head with those folks.

Part three, will talk about the clients, and the staff.

Evaluating media properties: New Media pros look at legacy titles as starting points for new digital publications

A while back I promised a reader that I would post on the subject of evaluating media properties. This reader was considering buying a recently shuttered property but was at a loss as to what the expected price might be. How would I evaluate the property, I was asked. Well, here we go:

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Why, if you are a potential digital publisher, would you invest in B2B?

The reason is simply because this is one area where the existing media companies are less advanced in digital publishing, the competition is weakened, and where the biggest opportunities exist for innovation (at least, that is the rationale I hear and would use myself).

Few B2Bs have made a good transition to the web; transitioning to mobile and tablets is even further behind. The best and most prosperous B2B media companies are now very diverse, often with profitable events, information and custom publishing divisions. The opening, therefore, is in digital media.

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In the U.S. the B2B media industry has been incredibly effected by media bankers: private equity companies that invest in properties, and the companies that represent the buyers and sellers when it comes time to get out of those investments. Few media trade journals want to talk much about this because the industry is so dependent on PE and M&A firms.

Because of this, buying a B2B property is fraught with dangers. Purchasing a magazine title that is "on the market" means sifting through the "Black Book", that selling document that contains a description of the property and the financials. Most black books aren't worth the paper they are printed on.

The problem is that they are written to show that the property is a good investment (of course), but are written from the perspective of the owner or banker. Frankly, I could care less what their opinion is of the property, they are dumping it. So why are they written this way? Because many of the buyers are PE firms themselves who really know next to nothing about the markets they are buying into (sorry, but it's true).

New Media pros, looking to buy a property, only are interesting in the markets they want to launch into – at least that is my experience. If someone wants to launch a new B2B digital property they have the whole universe to choose from, launching into a market they care about, or where they see an opportunity only makes sense. Take Rafat Ali, the co-founder of paidContent. His new venture, Skift, is in the travel industry and his posts and tweets show that he is genuinely intrigued by his industry – in this regard he is more like the B2B publisher of old than with his current colleagues.

I once sat in on an investment meeting in NYC concerning a possible big money investment in B2B properties. The bankers were shocked to learn I cared more about what I wanted to buy than simply what was currently on the market. That firm passed on my proposal and instead invested in an old line business that soon went belly up, but not before they were able to sell it to another PE. The game of musical chairs was far more interesting to them than actually learning the publishing business. These firms are the owners of many of the B2B companies in existence today.

Bottom line: if possible, skip the black book and look at the old P&L statements. These will show you the real picture and are a good reflection of how the current owner actually sees the performance of the property.

Then there are four other elements to consider: 1) the list, 2) the database, 3) the clients and 4) the staff.

Next: The List and The Database

ASBPE extends deadline for the Azbees B2B editorial award competition to February 4

The American Society of Business Publication Editors (ASBPE) today said that they were extending the deadline for their awards competition, the Azbees, until Monday, February 4. (The original deadline was January 28th.)

A list of the categories and submission requirements (generally PDFs) can be found on the competition website. Entry fees are $95 for ASBPE members and $115 for non-members.

Print editorial and design entries must have an issue date of 2012 to be eligible. while digital entries must have been published, posted, or emailed from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2012.

I'm not too into awards, but if you are feeling a little down, need to pump up your resume, or simply want a little recognition, there are plenty of categories offering your publication or website a chance to stand out.

For most B2B magazine titles getting serious about the web is still the top priority compared to mobile & tablets

To be sure, there are a lot of really good B2B websites to be found that are published by print magazines. But while the focus the past few year or so has been on launching first mobile and tablet applications, the fact remains that for most B2B titles getting serious about the web still has to be their top priority.

Before belatedly launching their first tablet editions, the ad trade magazines, AdAge and AdWeek, both created useful, well-designed websites for their titles - and both (AdAge, in particular) have been very good at using social media to promote stories on their sites.

But these two titles are very much the exception to the rule when it comes to B2B. Most trade journals continue to struggle with the basics of web publishing such as publishing fresh, new, interesting material every day, promoting that material through Twitter and other social media outlets, using blogs to build readership and drive regular traffic, creating forums and other community features, and selling digital advertising.

Part of the problem, as any publisher will tell you, is the short staffing that is the norm at most trade journals. But the fact is that many editors continue to struggle with the basic concepts of the web, such as frequency of new material.

One of the shocks I experienced lately was looking at the media kit of a magazine group with multiple titles and learning that the group's web traffic was just a fraction of this website's traffic. With established titles, constant opportunities to promote their sites through their magazines, newsletters and mailings, one would think the group's web traffic would have dwarfed TNM – but no, mostly because the content was stale, canned, and of little interest to the industry the sites were serving.

Blogs on B2B websites are a particular problem. Most B2B titles have long since adopted the blog as a standard feature of their industry websites. But getting bloggers to write daily remains a problem. One construction website I am familiar with successfully signed up multiple bloggers to attempt to drive traffic, but sadly their bloggers could not keep up, contributing a blog post only sporadically. You don't have to have a degree in psychology to know that readers will not come back to that site regularly once they have seen a few times that no new material is available.

The construction sites, of which many of the logos can be seen above, are actually pretty good compared to many other industry segments, probably because these titles, though struggling, are still larger than many other segment leaders. There are, no doubt, many good examples of trade journals that have successfully create thriving web properties – but they remain few and far between.

Even though many would like to rush into the tablet platform, many B2Bs would still be better off working on their websites if they feel they are still lacking in this area. When talking to digital publishing vendors, a good question to put to the company would be whether their digital publishing solution would help their websites. Many digital publishing platforms are one-trick ponies that simply build an app, or  create a PDF version of their print title. While other vendors are offering content management and work flow solutions that can help a company manage web publishing, while also offering a way to launch those first mobile or tablet editions.

Crain Communications releases new tablet edition for its B2B title Business Insurance

A new B2B tablet edition used to be a rare event, but things are starting to heat up. Crain Communications, which recently released a tablet edition for Crain's Chicago Business, today launched a tablet edition for its trade industry magazine Business Insurance.

Business Insurance Tablet Edition is an iPad edition that gives the reader a hybrid tablet edition – one where the print ads are pretty much as you would see them in print, but where the editorial pages are reformatted for the tablet.

The design is still somewhat influenced by print, as you will see in the walk-through video below, but the digital magazine is very readable and will be appreciated by those who are loyal readers of the B2B magazine.

Business Insurance is a BPA-audited weekly that has a little over 35,000 qualified non-paid subscribers and over 9,000 qualified paid subscribers. So the dilemma here is how to create a weekly digital magazine, and how to charge (or if to charge) for it.

The problem for B2B publishers, as I have written about before (so sorry to be repeating myself), is that there is no qualification method available to publishers. If Apple would hire me today to be their publisher liaison (do it!) I would be working with the B2B guys on creating a qualification mechanism that would encourage B2B publisher to launch their qualified circulation magazine on the iOS platform. Alas, there is no such mechanism today and so the trade publishing industry has been the slowest segment when it comes to launching tablet editions.

Here, with Business Insurance, Crain is letting their current subscribers log into the app to access the issues free of charge. Then new readers who want to access the issues can do so by buying an annual subscription for $149.99 (or individual issues for $9.99.)

For now the new app only contains a smallish sample issue )which is only a little over 30 MB in size) typical for apps just released into the Newsstand by Apple. I assume the app's store and library will begin to fill up with issues now that the app is live (in fact, as I am writing this, a new version of the sample issue is being loaded which is larger than the first sample as it is 183.1 MB in size – it contains a full issue with more advertising and features inside).

I should also note that while this new app is for the iPad, there is a reference on the magazine's website to interactive tablet editions for the Nexus, Kindle and Samsung Galaxy tablets, as well. I did not find an app inside Google Play this morning, but a new app may be coming very soon.

BevNet uses a replica solution to create its first tablet edition; pricing policy is contradictory and a bit mysterious

Following lunch I looked at my Twitter and found a vendor promoting a new app inside the Apple App Store for its client – and good thing since finding newly released digital magazines inside the store has been made more difficult by Apple's strange new redesign.

Having said that, there are times when one looks at a new tablet edition and the immediate thought that comes to mind is that you wish you had talked to the publisher before hand and asked them "do you really want to do this?"

The new app, BevNet Magazine, is good contrast to the new app released yesterday for Beverage World from Macfadden Communications. That app, seen here, used the Mag+ platform to create a hybrid app, where the print ads from the magazine appeared untouched, but the editorial pages were reformatted to produce a digital magazine that would be easier to read on the iPad. Additionally, Macfadden's digital team decided that the way to handle the issue of qualified circulation was to release the app as a free app where anyone interested in the content could download issues for free, subscribing only as a way to get the future issues to download automatically.

Bevnet Magazine, on the other hand, has built its ad using Tapedition. What this results in is a replica edition of the print magazine, unchanged in any way I could see from the print magazine. Another decision that was made was to charge for issues and subscriptions – well, sort of, as you will see.

According to the app description individual issues are to be available for $3.99 per issue, with an annual subscription available for $19.99. But the app has a "Buy" button for the one issue to be found inside the app, but no price. Tapping that button results in the issue downloading without the usual dialogue box that comes up confirming the purchase. Also, there is no price shown. (How this app got through Apple is a mystery.)

When I saw that the download was starting I had to wonder if I had been charged for the magazine (I hadn't). Was this December meant to be a sample issue? Who knows, this app is all doesn't say much, including how big the download that was occurring would be.

It turns out it was 234 MB, a rather huge size for a 68 page replica edition.

The only thing that might explain why this tablet edition is so large is its pop-up ads. Yes, like the app seen yesterday, Philly Beer Scene, this app has pop-up ads that obnoxiously show up every few pages. In fact, they are the exact ads as you can see below.

One might be surprised that a publisher would allow this to happen to their magazine, but after all these years I guess nothing surprises me anymore. But all I can say is "really, you want this?"
Left: the library/store page where there is a buy button, but no prices; Middle: the pop-up ad that shows up every few pages; Right: the layouts reveal that this is most definitely a replica edition.