#5 and Magnificent Man: contrasts between a custom solution versus PDF from Kindmags

A quick trip through the App Store this morning revealed that Apple was once again promoting a magazine that is being sold under the Kindmags.com name – #5 Magazine.

If the name of the name of the magazine is a mystery to you, no doubt your an American. Number five refers to the Manchester United defender Rio Ferdinand, and the magazine is a rather shameless way to sell lots of goods and capitalize on the soccer player's fame. The magazine, which can be found online, as well as in app form, is produced in association with New Era Global Enterprises which provides management services for a number of stars of the EPL.

Despite the magazine being centered around a star athlete, the app appears under the name of the developer: Kindmags.com. Currently there are 16 apps appearing under the name of that developer, all of them universal apps.

The vast majority of these apps are described by Kindmags themselves as "PDF" (or "PDF with Video"). One such magazine is Magnificent Man, a magazine from Bremont Watch Company. The effort for #5, however, is listed as "bespoke" – a custom project.

The two digital magazines couldn't be more different. Whereas #5 is designed specifically for the tablet, to be read in landscape, and is filled with audio and video, Magnificent Man was clearly designed for print and simply converted into app form from the art director's PDF file. One is easily read and enjoyable (if more than a bit too commercial), while the other is a nightmare of turning one's tablet and zooming in the read the content.

The last issue of Magnificent Man available through the app is the January/February issue. It is possible that the publisher, too, has realized that this is not an optimal way to bring one's magazine to the iPad.

Meanwhile, #5 is getting some more promotion from Apple (in the iPhone Newsstand section of the App Store), which is probably what the effort deserves.

Check out both digital magazines in this short video:

Lowe's uses a replica edition maker to create its tablet edition with less than impressive results

I certainly hope this isn't the last post of the week, as it would be a drag to end the week on such a down note. Let's hope something positive pops up to write about before the day ends!

The home and garden retailer Lowe's has launched a tablet edition of one of its branded magazines usually available only at store locations. The concept of using Apple's Newsstand as a way to expand the reach of these custom publishing projects is a great marketing concept – even if the end result seen here is probably a bad idea.

Lowe's Creative Ideas Magazine is a free app that will grant Lowe's retail customers gain free access to the issues inside. So far, so good.

But rather than building a native application that would allow for shoppers to gain more information on the products and services seen inside, Lowe's has taken the unfortunate route of working through a replica maker, in this case PixelMags, to create a somewhat enhanced digital version of the print edition. It doesn't work well.

For one thing, PixelMags makes bad apps. Sorry, they just do. This digital edition offers stuttering navigation, slow downloads and bugs.

But the real problem here is that the solution is just plain wrong. Every time the retailer wants to link to more product information one is taken outside the app to the website. The mechanism is not too awful in that one can easily close the window, but since the website was not designed for the iPad it simply is mixing two mediums – print and web – that were not designed for the tablet.

Replica makers are working very hard to hide the fact that their digital publishing solution is based on print. Digital editions can include hot links, embedded video and animation, and the like. But the foundation is print. The fact that some publishers still don't get the absurdity of the solution is only a reminder that so few print publisher get digital.

If the replica solution were moved to television imagine what would be on your screen: tiny text displayed on your flatscreen with the occasional audio or video. It would be seen as crazy. But for some reason, this is an acceptable solution for the tablet.

Left: the library pages where readers can download their issues for free; Middle: a page that appears to have an embedded video – I could not at first get it to work, but eventually it took me to YouTube; Right: a replica print page with links that take you out of the app to the Lowe's website.

Czech coffee café chain, Costa Coffee, has its branded magazine launched into the Apple Newsstand

I used to work for the Contra Costa Times, back in the day, and when my eye caught this new tablet edition inside the App Store I was excited for a split second that the poor, mismanaged MediaNews Group newspaper might have actually launched a decent tablet edition (it hasn't).

No, this new digital publication is from the Czech Republic, not Northern California. Costa Coffee Times - Pohodové noviny pro každého is the name for the new iPad edition of the corporate magazine of a Czech coffee house chain, which I assume offers better tasting coffee than your loca Starbucks (or, at least, I'd like to think so.

Costa Coffee Times is published for the company by Corporate Publishing, a Czech custom publisher. The digital edition of the magazine, created for the company's website, is pretty much the same as you'll see inside the new iPad edition. The current issue is only 30MB and features no multimedia other than some simple animation.

The app, on the other hand, comes from Quest Group from Düsseldorf, which has made a bit of a mess of the actual app information inside the Apple App Store. The company has misspelled the name of the magazine ("Costa Cofee Times") and has messed up the company links, as well (the link for Costa Coffee goes to Quest, while the link for Quest goes to Costa Coffee). The app description also says that the app is in English. The app also appears under the Quest Group name rather than the company's name, as well.

But I can think of a couple good reasons for TNM to check out the app. For one thing, I think this is the first app from the Czech Republic seen here. For another, as the former publisher of a coffee magazine, the topic continues to interest me. None of the U.S.-based coffee trade magazines can be found inside the App Store, and I think it will be a long time before one appears.

Left: the library page where one downloads issues; Middle: an article with the navigation exposed; Right: the tablet edition ends with a list of café locations.

United Airlines updates its mobile app, though customer resentment from carrier's on-time performance, merger, can not be cured through an app

Even a hard core advocate for mobile and tablet media has to admit that no app can save a company intent on destroying itself. Today's update of its mobile app by United Airlines looks to fix some issues with the previous release, and add in some features, but UA's brand will take a long time to recover.

United Airlines, the only app currently in the App Store under the new United Continental Holdings, Inc. name, is for the iPhone only, leaving travelers to use the regular website on their iPads (it appears to work just fine). United's in-flight magazine, Hemispheres, appears in the Newsstand under the name of their custom publishing partner, Ink.

The Chicago-based airline recently merged with Continental, which then forced its existing, long-time customers to get new customer numbers. But the airlines actual performance is what has rankled flyers.

This weekend the Chicago Tribune profiled the problems for flyers in their lengthy story for the Sunday paper: Merger pains for United Airlines leave passengers hurting.

On March 3 United switched to a computer system called Shares. In a rip-off-the bandage approach, United on the same day also merged websites and frequent-flier programs. The airline experienced technology glitches and rampant inefficiencies throughout the system. The results were widespread flight delays for several days and customer inconveniences, such as long phone hold times, for weeks afterward. Frequent fliers howled about problems with their rewards accounts and confirming their proper seat upgrades.

But the real kicker is that this system, which United chose to move it, involves knowing strings of commands, rather than simple point and click. No wonder then that the company wants to roll out an even newer system by the end of the year.

Right now United on-time performance trails its rivals, badly. At O'Hare, its hub, United flights depart on time only 71 percent of the time, arrive on-time only 73 percent of the time. American Airlines, by comparison, sees its departure leave on time 85 percent of the time.

As for United's mobile app, the most recent user comments have been mostly negative due to parts of the app not working. Maybe this update will be an improvement, no doubt United customers could use a bit of good news.

Groupe CANAL+ launches iPad editions for their cable and satellite television magazines in one app

The French television provider Groupe CANAL+ has launched a new iPad app which provides its customer with free access to its two customer magazines, CANAL+ Magazine and CANALSAT.

The tablet editions inside the app, formally called Les magazines CANAL+/CANALSAT, are completely native in design, available in landscape orientation – which makes sense since this is the shape of one's television screen.

New iPad resolution image here.

The tablet editions are free of charge, of course, and can be subscribed to through the app.

The tablet edition seen here in this post, CANAL+, is filled with animation as well as some video content. The layouts and general design are very well done. Unfortunately, one can not tell how large the file is one is downloading (at least not on the library page). But the good news is that the download is pretty quick, though I should report that the app crashed when the download was complete.

These are superior tablet editions, especially when compared to what many U.S. publishers are launching. Many European publishers from France, Italy and other nations have been quick to launch replica editions, but this new app for the new magazines from Groupe CANAL+ are a good sign that some media companies are willing to experience with the tablet platform.

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A short walk through the issue of CANAL+ currently available in the newly launch iPad app:

Capgemini Consulting uses the Apple Newsstand for a distribution channel for its digital information publications

The consulting firm Capgemini UK PLC this weekend launched a new app into the Apple Newsstand as a way of distributing its journals.

The new app, Digital Transformation by Capgemini Consulting, is free, and downloaders can gain access to the publications found inside at no cost.

In essence, the consulting firm is using the Newsstand simply as another way to distributing its publications for promotional purposes. Because they are not acting as a commercial publisher, there is no pay or advertising model, and hence no reason to go out of their way to create a native tablet editions – a replica here will do.

But there are some things Capgemini can do here that would improve their tablet publishing efforts. First, the person in charge needs to fix their app icon. The one currently in the store is low resolution and the wrong size. This is easy to fix.

Second, the app team might want to work with the production folks building the print journal. As a replica, the iPad edition simply is an exact copy of the printed version (I assume). But the pages feature a lot of white space, and a font that shows up rather lightly on the tablet display.

An easy adjustment would simply to build the print pages in such a way that the resulting PDF (or other graphic file) can be cropped to, say, 80 percent. This would increase the font size relative to the tablet display, and assist in reading.

Replica editions have their place, and this is certainly one of those times. But simple adjustments can make those replicas more easily read and more effective for the client.

Swedish custom publisher, Appelberg, relaunches its own customer magazine back into the Newsstand, providing a showcase for the company's digital publishing prowess

Eearlier this month the Swedish customer publishing company, Appelberg Publishing Group, launched a new iPad app version of its customer magazine. TNM caught the release and immediately posted a story about the new app. Since the magazine is in Swedish, I could not tell that the issue to be found in that new app was just a partial edition, there to provide the Apple review team a look at the new app with its natively designed digital magazine.

Johan Nohr, art director at Appelberg, contacted me the next day, expressing surprise that I had seen and grabbed, and written, about the new app so quickly.

"I’m very happy to see that you’ve featured our new iPad app Appelberg in your blog, and you are spot on about the reasons for us having the app and why we feel like it’s time to upgrade from the old one which was pretty much just a pdf reader," Nohr wrote me.

"I’m also amazed that you managed to find, download and even review the app in such short time! It’s quite funny actually, because we didn’t mean to publish this version of the app publicly. The version of the app that got released yesterday was intended for Apples review process only, and the final version will be more sophisticated and include lots of more material such as stories, images, animations and video (for instance, the cover image begins with a film from the photo shoot). Hence why the app you saw and reviewed is so light and starving for content."

Nohr then told me that Appelberg had already pulled down the new app and would relaunch it on the 20th (today). We arranged to hook up later via e-mail so that he could further explain their design choices. I sent Nohr a short list of questions and I liked his answers so much that rather than incorporate them into a follow-up story I've decided to get reproduce them here completely as they came to me:

1) You recently launched an app for your customer magazine, Appelberg. What digital publishing platform did you use to create this new app and why did you decide to use that platform?

Since we first started our journey into tablet publishing (summer 2010), we’ve worked with a few different platforms and solutions. These have spanned from the simplest PDF reader that we used in the beginning, to a highly experimental, custom-made HTML5 solution that for various reasons didn’t really cut it, to the production tool we use today.

We recently had a look at the different options available for tablet publication. We tried some of them, met a lot of people and drank a boatload of coffee doing both. We finally decided to go with Mag+, a Swedish production tool that not only suited the way we work at Appelberg, but also had a price model that was way more compatible with custom publishing than the other options. Most platforms, at least at the time we evaluated them, had a price model that assumed you sold subscriptions and issues, and that’s not often the case with us.

2) Your previous app for Appelberg was a replica edition, why the release of this new app?

The replica edition (that was essentially a PDF reader, with some links and video content on the side) worked out well in the beginning. But things inevitably changed, and production tools became more sophisticated and technically advanced. So we felt that we needed to stay updated with what was happening in order to be able to provide the best possible product for our clients. Nowadays, you can’t just publish a PDF on an iPad and call it a day – readers require something more captivating than that.

3) As I understand it, your company is the custom publishing division of Stampen AB, creating branded magazines for outside customers. Have any of your customers asked you about creating tablet versions of their magazines?

A big part of our job at Appelberg is strategic consultancy: We help our clients identify, select and communicate in different channels depending on the story. For some companies, getting a tablet app early isn’t the best option and some probably don’t need to make an app at all. But for others, it’s vital.

One of our largest clients in the industrial segment is the Swedish bearing company SKF, for whom we produce web content, a newsletter and an international customer magazine called Evolution (distributed four times a year, 40 pages, 120 000 copies in 12 language editions). Since they are such a tech-oriented company, they felt the need to be on the forefront of new technology. As part of their communication strategy, making a tablet version of Evolution was important. (You can read more about it, in Swedish, here)

The Evolution tablet edition was the first sharp project we produced using Mag+. We learned a lot from doing it, and the end result is something that we are very proud of. As a matter of fact, the second issue was recently released.

4) If so, are there plans to bring these magazines to the Apple App Store and will these be replica editions of the printed magazines, or reformatted versions?

As of now, all of the tablet magazines that we produce for our clients will be published in the Apple App Store.

5) The publishing industry remains in a depressed state in the U.S., how would you describe the situation in Sweden?

I’m not really the best person to answer that, so I asked Maria Westman, Editorial Director at Appelberg, to comment:
“The situation in Sweden is a bit different compared with the one in the U.S. Of course the publishing industry has taken a dip, but Sweden is a smaller country and readers still want printed publications. Swedish publishing agencies have been very creative over the past few years. To survive, they’ve had to think and publish in new formats, and to deliver solutions other than the printed magazine, such as tablet and mobile solutions and movies.”

Thank you to Johan Nohr and Maria Westman for giving TNM readers more information on their company, the new tablet edition, and a look at the state of publishing in Sweden.

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So how does this new tablet edition inside the newly released app compare to what I saw two weeks ago?

The tablet edition I saw then was a natively designed issue that would be familiar to anyone who has read a digital magazine that used the Mag+ platform. It still is, of course, but as Nohr said in his e-mail, now there are the bells and whistles you might expect from a tablet edition produced to show off the digital publishing skills of its publisher.

The easiest way to show you would not be screenshots, but a quick run through of the digital magazine itself, which you can see below:

Modern trade shows now often feature dedicated mobile apps, as well as tablet editions of the show daily

If you've ever worked in the B2B media publishing business, you probably have an opinion about show dailies – those printed show newspapers that appear in the morning at your hotel door and at the show itself, they purport to give attendees news about the show.

For the publisher, they are a pain to produce and are often break-even propositions. In the past, these daily print products could be lucrative, but the real reason to produce one was to be able to sell the exhibitors, and hopefully translate that business into future business inside your main B2B magazine.

Show dailies are not yet at the stage where a publisher can get away with going totally digital. As a result, the early efforts appearing inside the App Store, and inside the Newsstand, are replica editions such as this one from NewBay Media for the National Association of Broadcaster's annual convention set to begin later this week in Las Vegas. The NAB Show Daily News is an exact copy of the print edition most attendees will pick up at the show or at their hotel.

NewBay Media will produce four editions of the show daily, and so launching an app inside Apple's Newsstand will insure that readers receive their digital copies automatically each morning.

(NewBay Media is a relatively new company, formed in the fall of 2006. The company bought titles from CMP and IMAS Publishing Group early on. In late 2009 it bought several magazines from Reed Business Information as it was divesting its titles including Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News. Then last year it bought several title from Penton including Mix and Electronic Musician. Like almost all decent sized B2Bs today, it is owned by a private equity firm – in this case The Wicks Group.)

Producing a truly native tablet edition, rather than this hard-to-read replica using the Paperlit platform, would be better – but producing a show daily is hard enough so why go in that direction unless one decides to go digital only. (I doubt the show producers want that just quite yet.)

If you've never produced a show daily the idea is to have a set design, with standard layouts. Each day most, if not all the ads are identical. Most of the editorial is written in advance with photographs taken the prior day added in, along with an story or two that was actually written at the show.

Because of this, creating a tablet edition using a replica maker's platform shouldn't be too much of an additional burden, though it will, of course, be an additional cost.

But a publisher bidding on the job might decide to mention that they plan on a digital version of the show daily, which might impress the show producers (though it is generally the fee and any revenue split promises that wins the job).

While tablet editions are new to the show daily world, mobile apps are becoming old hat. Core-Apps is one company that has been producing apps for trade shows for a while now. The company produced a mobile app for the 2011 NAB Show and has released a 2012 version just in the past week.

2012 NAB Show is a universal app, though it is mobile in nature. That is, its real purpose is for navigating the show floor and learning more about the exhibitors.

The app has a standard set of features: a scheduler, a list of the exhibitors, a map of the show floor, a session schedule, list of speakers, as well as other items pertaining to the show.

The concept of a mobile app to navigate a trade show is great in theory. Whether attendees use them is a good question, though I would certainly be one that likes the concept – assuming it wouldn't drain the battery life of my cell phone.

The November election is set, its Romney versus Obama; an update on the new Appelberg tablet edition

Two weeks ago Rick Santorum was well ahead of Mitt Romney in the polls in Wisconsin, but a blow out loss in Illinois seems to change the minds of many in the northern Midwest state and yesterday it dealt a death blow to his chances at the nomination.

Wisconsin is often considered a swing state that generally leans towards blue in presidential elections. In 2008, Obama carried the state 56.3% to 42.2%. But supporters of the GOP have grown far more conservative and now are major supporters of the Tea Party movement. Polls show, for instance, that those that identify with the Republicans remain strongly supportive of their Republican governor, Scott Walker, despite his attacks on public unions. Wisconsin, one should remember, has been seen in the past as strongly pro-union and progressive in its politics. No more. Today the state is as severely divided as any state in the union (if "union" is even an appropriate term to be used today in the U.S.).

Yesterday, Mitt Romney defeated his opponents in all three GOP primaries and it appears all but certain that he will be the Republican nominee in the fall, and it sets up what could be the most bitter and divisive election this country has seen in quite some time.

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Appelberg's new app, before it was pulled.

Yesterday I wrote about the new app from Appelberg Publishing Group, a custom publisher from Sweden. They had just released a new version of their digital magazine that now was natively designed and resided in the Newsstand – their previous app being a replica edition outside of Newsstand.

Well, according to the art director from Appelberg, Johan Nohr, that app was not really supposed to go live, but was instead intended for Apple's review process. The app was approved, of course, and immediately went live.

I guess its hard to get a media app by TNM, because I saw it, downloaded it and posted about the app within minutes of its appearance. Because I concentrate on the design and development of media apps, rather than their actual content, I missed the fact that the app was really just a shell, a prototype of what the tablet edition will really look like when it is released again later this month.

"The version of the app that got released yesterday was intended for Apple's review process only," Johan wrote me this morning, "and the final version will be more sophisticated and include lots of more material such as stories, images, animations and video (for instance, the cover image begins with a film from the photo shoot). Hence why the app you saw and reviewed is so light and starving for content."

So if you're looking for the new app from Appelberg Publishing Group this morning you won't find it, they've pulled the app and will re-release it into the App Store on the 20th. In the meantime, I will take the opportunity to get more information on the app and will post a new story when it appears live in Newsstand again in two weeks.

Appelberg Publishing Group shows off its chops for clients with its own digital magazine; new iPad app is released that supports Apple's Newsstand

If you are a custom publisher, custom content producer, ad agency or other marketing firm, you want to demonstrate to your potential clients that you can handle the new digital publishing platforms. So what better way to do that than to launch an app into the App Store or one of the Android stores.

The new app resides inside Newsstand.

This was surely the thought behind the new app released today from the Swedish firm Appelberg Publishing Group. The publisher today released a brand new iPad app, Appelberg, that is a natively designed version of its print magazine.

Appelberg specializes in creating print and digital magazines for its clients. These custom publishing projects produce interesting magazines that are not merely promotional pieces but are sometimes compelling consumer magazines in their own right.

Naturally, Appelberg would want something that reflects its own company, as well – hence the magazine Appelberg.

Prior to the launch of this new tablet edition, Appelberg had released a previous app under the title Appelberg Publishing. That app was strictly a replica affair. What would have impressed clients would have been that there was an app at all available for readers who own an iPad. But the replica edition was hardly a showcase for the company.

The old app was a replica edition.

Now Appelberg has a new natively designed version of the magazine, complete with scrolling and swiping pages. The tablet edition is fairly small, and it can only be read in portrait. This keeps the size of the file down to only a little more than 10MB, and creates a rocket-fast download experience.

The experience of creating this version of their magazine, though, will enable them, in the future, to create similar digital magazines for their clients. This is precisely the advantage publishers have that invest in learning the new platform. For other publishers and agencies that continue to farm out digital production, they will remain at the mercy of the skill sets their vendors decide are important rather than growing as the new digital platforms grow.

Harrods brings its magazine to the iPad with a native designed tablet edition

The highlight for any first time visitor to London is a trip to Harrods, the department store that can trace its history back to 1824.

But if you can not get to London then at least you now can access the store's own branded magazine thanks to the firm launching a tablet edition into Apple's Newsstand (it also has a shopping iPhone app simply called Harrods.)

Harrods Magazine is free of charge, as is the content, as you'd expect from a custom content magazine.

The magazine's tablet edition can only be read in portrait and is a rather slow download (this is one area where it definitely can be improved). After that, the only downside I would say is that the high resolution artwork loads fairly slowly, but I think readers / shoppers won't mind as this is definitely one of those leisure reads that shouldn't be rushed into or out of.

The current issue available is April and it makes its appearance in Newsstand before it has actually appeared on the company's website.

Below is a two-minute walk-through of the start of the app with its embedded video and animated opening. No annoying voice over by me this time around.

Swiss manufacturer, Franke, brings its custom content magazine, CoffeeBar, to the iPad and Newsstand

Custom content has always been part of the iPad's media offerings, whether is is magazines from automobile companies, or catalogs, companies have been pretty quick to use the popularity of the iPad as a marketing opportunity.

This morning the Swiss-based manufacturer Franke saw the magazine published in support of its coffee business, CoffeeBar, released into the App Store.

Franke CoffeeBar Magazine, as you'd expect from a magazine designed to promote a company, is a free app offering its content for free. Franke Coffee Systems is listed as the seller within iTunes.

CoffeeBar is published only twice a year, but in three languages: German, French and English. Because of this, creating a tablet edition means having to decide whether to create separate apps, or try incorporate the different versions into one. By choosing to go with a replica edition approach, Franke was able to sandwich all three editions inside the app.

CoffeeBar also was able to launch with the previously published issues going back to 2007 – ten in all as there is only one issue from 2009.

Of course, being a replica means that the digital version of the magazine is often hard to read – impossible in landscape. But this may be one case where going the replica route makes the most sense for the publisher.

(Disclosure: I was, for a brief time, the publisher of a B2B magazine inside the coffee industry. The poor title – not to be named here – has seen more publishers and editors come and go in its short history than most titles do in a century.)

Air France brings its airline magazine to the iPad; tablet edition is a tour de force, but also a slow download

If you want to see a tablet magazine that has all the bells and whistles in it, the best place to look is usually at the magazines from the automotive companies. These apps, often produced by their advertising agencies, spare no expense in their development, and are usually free of charge because of their promotional nature.

The new tablet edition from Air France fits that description, as well. The app, Air France Magazine, is free to download, and offers its in flight magazine free, as well.

Air France Magazine, the app, appears under the Societe Air France S.A. name, while the magazine is published by Gallimard, with advertising sold by Lagardère Publicité.

One knows immediately that the February issue contained in the iPad app is huge – despite it not showing its size – as it takes forever to download the issue. I have a general rule I like to follow regarding issue download speeds: if my iPad goes to sleep during the download then the issue is too large, or the download speeds too slow. In the case of Air France Magazine, you wouldn't want to download the issue just prior to boarding the plane because you would most likely miss your flight.

Once you open up the issue, though, it becomes apparent why it took so long to download. The issue utilizes both portrait and landscape orientations, contains animation, and the navigation is very attractively done.

The publisher has made sure that the ads can be viewed in both orientations – that always takes a lot of work to get copy for both layouts.

But the in flight magazine also makes sure that English language readers won't be left behind either. While it is clear from the headlines that the original language of the magazine is French, each story can be read in English by toggling the French/English button.

(By the way, I want to let you know that creating that animated GIF seen above that shows the language mechanism was a real pain to create.)

I'll have to live with the magazine a while before I come to any conclusions about whether all this work is, in the end, worth it. But the tablet edition certain looks great, and functions well (after that initial download).

In the meantime, here is another app that publishers will want to look at to see what creative publishers, developers and agencies are doing with their own tablet editions. You certainly can't beat the price, and it might be a nice read while on a long flight, even if you aren't traveling on Air France.

Tablet publishing will not be immune from hucksters; the low cost of digital publishing will be attractive to 'profile' publishers looking to avoid printing their magazines at all

My first job in the B2B publishing industry was with The McGraw-Hill Companies, known to me as a major publisher of such magazines as Business Week (now owned by Bloomberg) and Engineering News-Record. I always saw them as a giant in the industry, though once I got there I realized that their heart was in the financial services area.

As the publisher of the local building trades newspaper and information service, I quickly learned that the previous publisher had made his revenue numbers mostly by producing special sections called profile issues. The formula was simple: the publisher called a major builder and said that our publication wanted to do a special section just about them. The whole 16 to 32 pages would be dedicated to their company, with stories about their building projects, their personnel, and with a major feature on their chief executive. The catch was that they needed to support the project in three ways: buy the back page ad, agree to buy some reprints of the section, and supply us with a list of their major suppliers and subcontractors.

We would turn around and sell ads to those on the list the company gave us – that was how we would make our numbers.

The whole thing seemed like a scam to me, like blackmail. After all, the sales pitch to the suppliers was that they did business with XYZ Company, and they really should support that company by buying an ad. It was blackmail, wasn't it?

Worse, the previous publisher had used a shady outside contractor to do much of the advertising – someone with a reputation for twisting arms.

My boss at McGraw-Hill thought it would be a good idea to get rid of the outside contractor if only to avoid future trouble. But he, my boss, still thought doing the profiles was a good idea.

At first I was against continuing the profiles but soon both my staff and some customers convinced me that we should continue them. These sections, it turned out, were well-written, and well-received by both the readers and the advertisers. It wasn't really blackmail, it turned out, if we truly were printing up the sections (we were), distributing them to all our readers (we were), and if they had the name of McGraw-Hill behind them (we did). Further, our advertisers felt that they were a good way to advertise since they could show them to other builders, sort of proof that they were well regarded suppliers or contractors.

So we continued the practice, though we eventually started to do other sections that were more general in nature, and less about one company only.

It didn't completely surprise me, years later, to learn that there were other companies doing similar kinds of things, but on a much bigger scale. These companies had built an entire business model around the technique of selling ads from lists supplied by the companies they would write about. These companies employed large phone rooms filled with staffers that called both the companies that would be profiled and the advertisers that would be solicited from the lists.

The sales people who called the big companies would often be called editorial researchers, but they were simply sales people – trained to sell the company on the article idea, and to sell them on the idea that they should hand over lists of the companies they do business with.

You'd think that companies would shy away from handing over those lists, but such is the lure of positive press that many were more than willing to have their partners and clients be bombarded with the calls from the ad sales people.

Sometimes the model would be a bit different in that the editorial itself would be sold, in which case it might be hard to tell the difference between what one would call custom publishing and something else more nefarious.

But what would separate out the legitimate publishers from the scammers was usually whether these magazines would be printed in large numbers and were audited. Very few publishers ever bothered to have an audit firm check their numbers. Further, no matter how many copies the publisher claimed they printed of their titles, usually one a small number (if any) ever made it into print – usually printed outside the U.S. (U.S. printers generally want to get paid within 60 days).

But these magazines also had one other thing in common: they were gorgeous. Well-designed, printed on good paper stock, these magazines were often quite impressive both in looks and size – with folios often well over 200 page, sometimes over 400. It was only by closely reading the magazines did you come to realize that the articles were simply press release material, and that the ads were not from companies you might expect to advertise, like major brands, but from small firms looking to butter up the subjects of the editorial pieces.

A decade ago, when the economy was in better shape, one publisher I am aware of routinely produced monthly issues that exceeded $500,000 in ad revenue, and then turned around and printed and mailed about 5,000 copies of the actual printed magazine. Whether any of these issues were sent to "readers" was hard to tell, but the companies profiled got copies, as did the advertisers, as did future prospects.

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Two new tablet apps show that spending time on native layouts will result in a better tablet reading experience

It is always a joy to download new iPad apps that prove to be a joy to read – the experience is far too rare these days. But these two apps (below) show the value in investing in native tablet production.

The first app comes from the German publisher CHIP Communications GmbH for its namesake magazine CHIP. The app is free to download and provides readers with free previews of the magazine editions found inside.

Each issue costs $3.99 per issue, or the reader can subscribe for three months at $9.99, $19.99 for 6 months, or an annual subscription at $37.99 (obviously the prices are different in the German App Store, for instance individual issues cost € 2.99).

The previews give the reader more than enough content to make a decision. More importantly, it shows the reader what the reading experience will really be like: landscape and portrait layouts, native page design which includes scrolling within pages, etc.

The issues open with an animated cover, which can be somewhat annoying because every time one encounters the page the animation plays again. But the animation is kept to a minimum at least.

This app has been in the App Store for several months now, but an app update was issued today to fix various bugs. The reader response to the app has been generally very favorable, with most complaints in the German App Store centering on the subscription prices being charged rather than the app itself.

Left: CHIP can be read in both portrait and landscape, with the ads redesigned to fit both orientations; Right: the TOC is simple and cleverly designed for the iPad reading experience.

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A new app for Kent State University was released yesterday into the App Store. Developed by iMirus, the digital publishing division of Riggs Heinrich Media, the app is can be found inside Newsstand and is free to download, as is the content inside.

My expectations were that I would find replica editions of the campus brochures, but was pleasantly surprised to find that the brochures have been redesigned to be read on the iPad, taking advantage of native design ideas such as text boxes, embedded video, etc.

As a result, the app is very easy to use and read. The app was a bit sluggish on my first generation iPad (for this reason I am looking forward to getting iPad 3 when released), and gave me a memory warning when I played the Crooked River Adventures video found inside. But it did not crash, I might add.

Rather than using adjustable fonts, the app relies on pinch-to-zoom, which I found odd, but otherwise the app worked fine. But the developer iMirus has other apps inside the App Store that have pretty negative reviews due to performance issues (such as the negative reviews for Charisma Media Magazine). This app, then, appears to be a major improvement over the previous apps released by iMirus.
Left: The school President's opening page, with a scrollable text box; Right: the Crooked River Adventures article containing the embedded video.

Content branding company Specialist UK launches iPad magazine app for French automaker Peugeot

As I've said many times, some of the best iPad magazine apps for publishers to look at come from agencies representing automakers. The reason is simple: the budgets are bigger, and the costs get passed on to the client. As a result, the apps are generally excellent, and often quite innovative.

A good example of this comes from Specialist UK, a branded content agency (or custom publisher, if you prefer). One of its client is the French automaker Peugeot, now out of the U.S. market, but very much still alive elsewhere. Specialist produces an interactive magazine for its client called e-motion (you can see the latest issue here), and had previously released an iPhone app for Hiscox Insurance called ContentsCalc, as well as a paid magazine app called Living Lighter.

Now the agency has released Rapport for iPad, an iPad-only tablet magazine that exploits the capabilities of the digital publishing platform with both portrait and landscape content, lots of interactive elements, and multimedia content.

Since the app is free I would encourage you to, watch for it, give it a test drive (sorry about that). Most of the content is contained in the app itself, you do not need to download an issue like a regular consumer magazine app. That is why the app itself is 376 MB in size.

The app includes sections for Showrooms, Videos, Offers, Brochure(s), Find a Dealer and Test Drive, as well as the magazine content. I would recommend starting the app in portrait, it just seems designed to begin that way.

Condé Nast's Wired tries its hand at the single-sponsored tablet special section app with 'Creating the Nebula'

The special section is still a tried and true method for pumping up ad revenue at many newspapers (and magazines, too). For some smaller publications, the measurement for whether the special section can succeed is judged by how quickly a sales rep can sell the back page ad spot. Think of it as almost the equivalent of the single-sponsor section.

Condé Nast's Wired magazine is experimenting with using the iPad to produce special sections. WIRED Creating the Nebula is a free iPad app that is sponsored by Cadillac. The app description says this app is the first of a four-part series.

Directed and produced by Annaliza Savage, the app is basically a way of presenting a video documentary about artist Reuben Margolin and efforts to build the world's largest moving sculpture.

As a concept for a special section, this app is brilliant: the app itself is simple (overly simple, but we'll get to than in a second), and the single-sponsor method makes it easy to get off the ground. In fact, whether Cadillac is actually paying anything for this is a good question – I could imagine that this might have been thrown into a proposal as an added-value the same way many publishers threw in web advertising as added-value in the bad old days (you don't still do that, do you?).

If there is a problem here it is with the app itself. Since all it is a video player with chapter navigation the quality of the video player is the most important factor in whether this app succeeds. In this regard WIRED Creating the Nebula is about as bad a video vehicle as can be imagined.

First, there are no video player controls, meaning that once the video starts the only way to stop it is to shut down the app. There is no scrubber, no volume controls, and most importantly, no AirPlay capability. The video player can easily be expanded to fill the screen, but that is about it.

The lack of AirPlay and video player controls so astounded me that I felt it important to click on the support page listed in the app description. No surprise I suppose that it took me to the regular Wired app support page, which did not say anything about this new app.

Second, because this app is essentially a video carrier, it weighs in at 501 MB. A few extra megabytes certainly could have been spared to include some text beyond the one paragraph under the information symbol.

Overall this one looks like a rush job, put out there in a hurry to keep a major advertiser happy. But it is free, so readers can't complain – and like I've said, it's a good concept.

Bonnier's series of buyers guide apps a roadmap to what B2B media companies should be doing on mobile, tablets

They are not pretty, not very complex, fairly easy to produce, and are much appreciated by their advertisers -- they are buyers guide apps produced by Bonnier's divisions that exploit industry data already in-house. They are, in short, what so many B2B media companies could produce if they rethought their traditional print buyers guides products.

The app seen here, Transworld Wakeboarding 2011 Boat Buyers Guide, is but one of several buyers guide apps now in the iTunes App Store. These apps are free, universal apps -- very appropriate, in the case, for the iPhone (seen here on an iPad).

These apps are fairly minimal in design, with only a portrait mode (which makes sense since these apps designed to also work on the iPhone).

In fact, with the exception of some design work that is built into the product finder mechanism, these apps could almost be built with some of the built-it-yourself services now appearing online.

What makes these apps perfect for B2B companies, though, is that if you search inside the App App Store you will find more apps just like the one seen here. This app contains information on a number of company's products, including Tigé, Malibu, Axis and MasterCraft -- and if you look in the App Store you will find that there are apps for Tigé, Malibu, Axis and MasterCraft, all built by Bonnier.

Whether these branded apps were sold to the manufacturers as separate buys, bundled with the annual commitments, or even given away as added-value, this represents a service that differentiates Bonnier-the-publisher from the competition. For these brands, these apps represent the first time they have appeared on a smartphone or tablet with their own app. It is smart business on the part of Bonnier, and something that I assume a B2B like Penton Media is considering for themselves.

Jaguar's first 2011 issue of its customer magazine an interesting take on the tablet publishing platform

Last fall I looked at the first iPad app released by Jaguar Cars Limited as part of an ongoing look at the automotive magazines being released by manufacturers. These customer publications are free from the monthly deadline grind, often with pretty healthy budgets, and no requirement that they one day turn a profit. Their goal is marketing alone.

Produced by the custom publishing division of Haymarket Market in the UK, that first tablet edition has been pulled from the App Store and in its place you will find Jaguar Magazine March 2011. Still free to download, the customer magazine is still a great ride, and very instructive for those publishers searching for an alternative look at tablet publishing.

This issue no offers both portrait and landscape. Instead, the app sticks to landscape, better to show off the video content embedded within. Like Project, Esquire and other new tablet editions, the magazine 'cover' (an increasingly outdated term, really they are 'splash' pages) is itself a video. In this case, however, Haymarket does not create layers like in the consumer magazines where text overlays the moving image, here is just a video of a blue XKR-S (prices start at $132,000, if you're interested).

The app is fairly simple in construction as it begins: full pages of content with scrolls to a secondary page. The navigation is smooth and the reader might get lulled into thinking this was a pretty minimal app.

The fun begins at the Jaguar E-Type story. It opens with a video and moves on to a series of photographs of the first E-Type Jaguar launched at the 1961 Geneva Motor Show. Again, development-wise, this really isn't terribly complex stuff -- after all, that first page is simply a video and what follows are static pages. But I still find it effective from a reader's perspective.

I admit that I am a Jaguar driver, and so may be giving this app more credit than it is due. But I have always found the tablet editions released from the auto companies to be more interesting than much of the consumer magazines released. I also find that they produce more good ideas for me, as well.

(I've just downloaded Atomix Mag which promises to be a tour-de-force compared to this more modest effort, but will I find it more enjoyable?)

Discussion boards and tablet apps from ForumRunner; Sports media guides and the potential of tablet publishing

While all eyes are on Al Jazeera television (LiveStation app here) watching events in Egypt, let's put a light on a couple of apps that might get your ideas flowing:

This new app from GCS Publishing, JeepForum.com - Jeep Discussions, got my attention this morning, an app that is essentially just a discussion board, but one that makes it easy to read on your iPad. Is it a better solution than the built-in Safari browser? I don't necessarily think so. But forums are rarely discussed when the conversation turns to mobile and tablet apps, let alone website design. Discussion boards are kind of the old men of the Internet, but they drive a huge amount of traffic, and many of them have been become default substitutes for lame B2B magazines and websites. (I won't even go into the crazy, insane attitude the company I formerly worked for had about forums.)

It looks like this app is really not from GCS Publishing since a look at their website shows that they are not very technologically savvy. Instead it looks like this app is really from ForumRunner, under the developer name End of Time Studios, LLC. The company has 54 universal apps in the App Store, as well as numerous apps in the Android Market.

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The little app from Wehaa Design, a website design company from Milwaukee, also attracted me simply because I was hoping this would a new take on the traditional sports media guide.

Sadly, this app for the Milwaukee Admirals, a hockey team in the American Hockey League, is a simple replica copy of the print media guide. The app looks pretty silly in portrait mode as many of the layouts are designed to be two-page spreads, but improves in landscape.

But the idea of a media guide on the iPad seems a natural. An inventive publisher could include lots of photography, as well as video highlights of team games in a multimedia media app.

But this app already weighs in at 126 MB, yet it has no audio or video, no thumbnail navigation, no animation, and no pinch-to-zoom. So why the size? It must be poor optimization.

Nonetheless, think about what you could do on an iPad in a media guide that you can not do in print: the possibilities are endless.