Replicas from the Palm Beach Daily News, the National Review; Florida paper wants no part of Apple's App Store

The Palm Beach Daily News launched its first iPad app in the App Store today, but it is clear that the local newspaper is no fan of tablet publishing as the app does not offer any way to actually buy the digital editions or to subscribe in any way.

Instead, the media executives are going retro: they have included the phone number for the circulation department in the app description!

The app, Palm Beach Daily News Electronic Edition, is free to download, but the app contains no in-app purchase mechanism, instead, if you are currently a subscriber to the paper, you can sign-in to your account to access replica editions of the current editions. The app does offer a couple sample issues but what you get is the usual replica edition where the reader has to pinch to zoom in order to have a chance at reading the articles.

The paper is a bit unique in other ways, as well, as it is published daily for part of the year, twice weekly "offseason".

The app was developed by Olive Software, a company I had heard of as creating replica products, but one that has been quiet for a while. The company's website looks pretty dead: its last press release is shown to be from 2009, and the company has yet to change the copyright date on its website to reflect that it is 2011 – not a good sign.

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The National Review is a strange little magazine. The magazine was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr. but for the past few years the magazine has been far less influential than its website which contains The Corner blog.

Not being someone who considers themselves "conservative" I find the magazine confusing. Take its recent issue that has Paul Ryan on the cover morphed into FDR, with the title "Ryan's New Deal". Paul Ryan, of course, is the Wisconsin representative that wants to end Medicare. The National Review obviously loves the idea, but why make him look like FDR? The magazine hates FDR! Very strange.

Anyway, this app is certainly better thought out than the one above. The app, National Review (witty take on the magazine's name) is free to download and creates a library where fellow conservatives can access the issues for free if they are already print subscribers. But the National Review believes in free enterprise, so they have embraced Apple's in-app subscription system – individual issues can be bought for $1.99 per issue, or you can subscribe for 6 months at $11.99, or a full year at $19.99 (that's about ten bucks off what the website is currently offering an annual print edition subscription for).

The app doesn't incorporate its website blogs but it does offer a great archive feature. Users can search the magazine's archives, and even it they are not subscribers, can buy access to individual articles for 99 cents a piece.

Pressjack looks to offer RSS feed driven digital magazines for both online and tablet delivery

Trinity Innovations, the company behind 3D Issue digital flipbooks, is currently in beta with a new product that hopes to bring a new digital publishing solution to publishers – one that is RSS feed driven, instantly updated, and can be viewed both online on your PC, as well as on your iPad.

PressJack has been described as a sort of Flipboard for online magazines. That isn't quite right: Flipboard is a consumer product where the reader brings in RSS feeds from content producers and re-lays them out into an attractive iPad product; PressJack if for publishers, creating a digital magazine out of their own RSS feeds. In a way it is a logical outgrowth of the Flash flipbook product, and something other flipbook vendors should consider – most continue to push replica editions.

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← The PressJack work space.

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"We're launching in Beta so we can shape it around user's requirements," Hannah Baldaro of PressJack told me last week.

"So instead of us making something that isn't needed, or isn't wanted, release in Beta to find out user behavior and how they want to it and we can add the features for the final version."

The system is pretty simple: you sign up on the PressJack website then download the beta software. Then you create a publication and begin adding in RSS feeds. Three weeks ago, when I first heard of PressJack, the customization options were few. Now, after a couple of updates, there are more attractive options available such as customizing the cover, adding in stand-alone HTML pages.

After each step the publisher can demo their product to see how it is coming along. I created a demo publication is about ten minutes this morning, though I will admit I was already pretty familiar with the digital publishing solution. The only element I customized was the actual size of the publication – having it match the exact resolution of the iPad.

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← The output version of TNM.

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Unfortunately, one can't see these digital magazines on an iPad right now, but Baldaro promises that will come.

"For the moment it runs in Flash," Baldara said. "So that's just for Beta and then when it's launched it will have an HTML5 output solution, so, obviously, it will be able to be viewed on any device."

"Then there is plans for it to be web hosted, as well. Once you've created your digital magazine it sits online and then it updates itself," Baldaro told me.

For now, publishers can output their digital magazines for self-hosting.

PressJack, as mentioned, is in beta, but should launch as a final product soon. "It was released probably three weeks ago, we've already had two updates, so we're hoping in six to eight weeks," Baldaro said.

For me, I hope they never go "live". By that I mean, that hopefully the developers will not feel like PressJack is ever a finished product. There is a lot of things that could be added, so it might be best if they just keep updating the product indefinitely.

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← The standard article layout.

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Some of the things I would like to see in the future would include a TOC solution, or the ability to use that is today the home page as a second page, allowing the creation of your own cover.

The biggest thing would be layout options: right now all digital magazines created would look pretty much the same. Being able to produce "themes" would be nice, or at least being able to manipulate the themes as you can on Blogger or WordPress.

Finally, what about advertising? Right now the easiest way to add advertising would be as stand-along HTML pages. It would be nice to be able to incorporate network ads into the article layouts, as well.

I should mention, finally, that some of these features suggested above may already be available to beta users, after all, I'm not an expert users at this point. But you can check PressJack easily enough by going to their website and signing up and taking it for a test drive.

aside magazine, an HTML5 magazine for the iPad: promising concept results in an unreadable product

The Google meltdown last week prevented me from posting a look at aside magazine, touted as the "World's first magazine just made with HTML5". The screenshots were taken, a video shot, but Blogger was down and so it was on to the weekend for me.

The concept behind aside is great: one opens up the web home page using your iPad's Safari browser. Your site sniffs out the source and delivers a page that requests that you create a bookmark icon – something that can be done for any web page, by the way. Then the iPad owner clicks the icon, which launches their browser which loads the aside home page.

For many iPad owners, they will not even know that this isn't really an app – until they actually attempt to read the magazine, however.

Unfortunately, the experience is not good: swiping between pages is not smooth, scrolling is jumpy, loading is uneven.

Is this the fault of the programming, or the iPad? The concept, or the delivery?

Because I saw no reason to upgrade my iPad, I'm still using the first generation iPad. It is possible that the iPad2's faster CPU could improve the reader's experience, but I think that is unlikely.

The promise of HTML5 is that it would allow publishers to create tablet editions that can be read in both portrait and landscape that would completely bypass Apple's App Store. It also would allow publishers to create magazine-like products for any browser based device so that one could create a completely different type of website experience (later today I'll talk about another company moving in this direction, PressJack.)

This was supposed to be what Flash could bring to the web, but the software ended up being used mostly for advertising and web elements rather than complete web experiences – in fact, most web users vocally oppose Flash sites, in general. HTML5 supposedly will be a better solution, and my guess is that it will be, eventually.

You can test aside yourself, it is free, after all, all you need do is surf on over to the website and test it on your iPad. As you can see from the video below – screenshots don't capture scrolling and swiping very well – my own experience was not the best:

Media firm musical chairs: Primedia sold to TPG Capital

For the private equity business it never ends: buy properties, sell properties, cash in some profits, dump some losses. For the folks at Primedia they know the routine all too well.

Today Primedia's President and CEO Charles Stubbs made the latest sales announcement: the company has been sold to TPG Capital for $7.10 per share, or about $525 million.

“I am pleased to announce this agreement as it delivers significant value to our shareholders," Stubbs said in the company's announcement. "In addition, it is a clear endorsement of PRIMEDIA and of the hard work and commitment of each and every one of our employees. TPG is a premier private investment firm and has a strong understanding and appreciation for our marketplace, our business model, our business strategies and the potential opportunities that lie ahead. We are very excited about this transaction.”

For Primedia, experience with the media banking business is just the norm. The company has been publicly traded for years, but its controlling stake has been owned by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, which help found the company back in 1989. Founded as K-III, it soon was renamed Intertec Publishing and quickly began rolling up media properties – Macmillan, Funk & Wagnalls, nine magazines from News Corp., 14 properties from Cahners, etc. etc. Eventually it started selling off many of the properties it owned, such as the B2B titles it had acquired that are now part of the Penton Media group – itself owned by a PE firm.

Moving Media+ launches new version of its Mag+ Review iPad app; digital publishing system spun out by Bonnier

The digital publishing system Mag+, recently spun out of the Swedish media firm Bonnier into its own company, Moving Media+ AB, has released a new version of its Mag+ app for the iPad.

The new app, Mag+ Review, is a free download in the App Store, and is meant to replace the previous version which users installed themselves.

If you have been playing around with the new digital publishing system then you will want to update this app, asap. If you are unfamiliar with the Mag+ system then here is a brief description:

The Mag+ system centers around a plug-in for InDesign that allows you to build digital publications for the iPad. The plug-in based system works with the Mag+ Reviewer app by exporting the InDesign work to the app for displaying on your iPad.

Unlike the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite which costs a fortune to get started, the Mag+ system is free at the start. The user downloads the required software and gets started. But the costs get heavy on the backend: $2500 for a branded app, good for only five months, followed by a $500 per issue charge, or $500 per month for unlimited publishing.

If you were publishing multiple magazines or books each month using the system the cost could be spread enough to make it very reasonable. But for the individual title or unfunded start-up the costs could be tough to swallow. The advantage of the system, obviously, is that it is InDesign based, making it easy for many art directors to begin producing tablet editions.

Morning Brief: Two lessons from Google's Blogger outage; new hard drive from Seagate targeted at iPad owners

The two day Google debacle is most assuredly not the talk of the town. Unless you were effected directly, you really probably didn't really mind that half the blogs around the world were down – they are just blogs, after all ;) But I can think of at least two important lessons that can be learned from the outage – if you didn't know them already.

First, cloud storage is not about storage. With both Amazon and Google recently launching cloud music services, and with Apple rumored to be about to launch their own, the issue of a cloud service's reliability comes to the forefront. For any cloud service, an outage of service creates a giant warning sign about that company's performance track record. If you are relying on a company of actual storage, even a once in a blue moon outage is cause for worry.

That is why cloud music services are not about storage, they are about convenience. If a service is designed to actually store all that data, then eventually it will fail – an outage is pretty much inevitable. But if the service is about convenience, and customers use the service strictly for streaming, keeping the vast majority of their data on their own hardware, then the service has some value.

One rumor out there involves Apple not requiring users to upload their entire catalog of music in order to use the service. That is, say you are uploading two songs – something by Lady Gaga, and something by Miriodor (a band out of Montréal) – the service would recognize that there are already copies of the first song and the service would not upload the song, simply recording that you are entitled to a stream of it, the second song would have to be uploaded. The idea here would be that Apple wouldn't have to store ten million copies of the same data, but could instead use their storage space to created redundant storage so that an outage would be next to impossible.

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One reason Google's outage didn't seem to be really big news is that America's media, especially its B2B media, is gun shy when it comes to reporting on bad news concerning major companies – that is, US companies.

It is a phenomenon all too familiar to B2B publishers: a company has problems with a product and editors, afraid of upsetting their publishers or the company themselves, either downplays the news or doesn't cover it at all. It is a big reason why America's trade magazine industry has imploded: most B2B magazines are simply not worth reading. (A common phrase heard from prospective readers is always "there is nothing inside that I don't already know.")

With Google, the problem is that the company touches so many areas now: search, advertising, apps.

Yet Google's own response to it's outage should have raised a firestorm: a post on its own online blog once a day simply isn't adequate. But if I were an executive at Google I would have noticed that the PR damage done to the company was negligible, thanks to the media.

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Speaking of storage: there are a number of product reviews online this morning for Seagate's new portable hard drive, the GoFlex Satellite. The best one can be found on ZDNet here.

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