eMarketer estimates the tablet market at 99M units by the end of next year, with Apple's iPad still dominating

The digital marketing media unit eMarketer has released an infographic called US Digital Media Usage: A Snapshot of 2013. It's project was sponsored by ExactTarget, by the way.

The infographic covers such areas as Internet usage, ecommerce, online video, mobile and tablets.

eMarketer estimates that the size of the U.S. tablet market will be 99 million users by the end of next year, and the Apple's iPad will continue to dominate the market with 70.5 million users, or 71.2 percent of the market. That equates to just over 22 percent of the population.

I would estimate that Apple is currently around 44-45 million units, maybe a bit more than that based if they come in with a blowout quarter. They would need to sell about 25-26 million iPads in 2013 to hit these numbers.

It appears that Apple is now doing well in China, so overall sales will be good in the next quarter, but publishers are obviously most interested in the tablet penetration numbers in the markets they are serving, more than simply in total sales.

Photography Week, a natively designed weekly tablet magazine from Future Publishing, tests the iPad's computing power

Among the some 60 apps updated by Future PLC this past few days was the relatively new tablet-only magazine Photography Week. Unlike many of Future's tablet editions, Photography Week is natively designed, taking advantage of the iPad's animation, video and slideshow capabilities.

The magazine app offers individual issues at $1.99 a piece, but also offers monthly subscriptions at $4.99 per month or $28.99 per year. New subscribers can test out the magazine by signing up for a subscription to get a free access for 30 days before their paid subscription kicks in.

Photography Week is built using Future's own digital platform, FutureFolio. The platform promises publishers the ability to produce both replica, enhanced or interactive editions. The cost is £350 plus download costs, and there is an enterprise package available at £15k per year.

The latest issue weighs in at just under 270 MB, its sized moderated by the decision to go with portrait only page designs – the app, though, will work in landscape within the library and store until one starts reading the issues.

This is a well-designed native tablet magazine, and it is a shame that some of Future's other titles aren't going in this direction today, though I would guess that over time we'll see more and more of them do this as the proportion of print to digital subscribers begins to shift more towards the digital side.

---

Here is a brief walk-through a portion of the latest issue of Photography Week. The hiccups you see may be the result of low computing power of the third generation iPad I use. This continues to be a problem for native tablet editions as Apple is not giving its tablets enough memory or storage, something that I would think Apple would consider essential for making sure its tablets perform at their best when developers push the envelope with their apps.

Morning Brief: The ABC rebrands its self as the Alliance for Audited Media; Future PLC issues a boat load of app updates for its magazine titles; Condé Nast says it is averaging 540,000 digital circulation a month

Happy Friday, I certainly hope it is warmer where you are than here in Chicago. It's not even Thanksgiving yet (that's next week), and already we're freezing our tails off.

Yesterday the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) unveiled a new name and look, a makeover for the auditing organization as it tries to adjust for the changing world of publishing. As of yesterday, the ABC is now the AAM – the Alliance for Audited Media.

"The ABC brand has served our organization and our industry well for nearly 100 years, but this represents much more than a name change," said Michael J. Lavery, president and managing director of the newly named Alliance for Audited Media. "With advancements in the media industry and the progress our organization has made in developing new digital audit services and cross-media expertise, we felt it was time to refresh our brand to better reflect our strategic role in the new world of media."

The AAM will release its newest digital publishing survey in December, but yesterday previewed it, reporting that 90 percent of AAM publishing members now provide content on digital devices like such as tablets and smartphones, up from 51 percent two years ago.

The AAM also announced yesterday that it had conducted an audit of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite's analytic processes and key metrics. Honestly, I have absolutely no idea what that means, and I doubt they do either. I guess this is the equivalent of putting the Good Housekeeping seal of approval on the platform – not that anyone was holding their breath over this.

"The certification confirms the platform adheres to industry standards for interactive content measurement processes and delivers the transparency that’s so necessary in digital and mobile advertising today," said Eric John, vice president, AAM digital services.

OK, right. Got it (I think).

---

it's tough enough managing a couple of magazine apps, but I can't imagine what it would be like to issue 60 app updates over a 24 hour period. But that is what Future PLC did.

The U.K. publisher issued 60 updates for its mostly universal iOS apps including updates for Mac Life Magazine and Photography Week. If you think I intend to list all of app updated here you're crazy.

The updates were issued to finally bring the apps support for iOS 6 and also the iPhone 5's larger display. All the app updates mention the added iPhone 5 support, even when, in the case of Photography Week, for instance, it is not a universal app – a sign that doing updates in bulk may not be a good idea.

Most of Future's apps are simple replica editions, a decision that was made, I suppose, because of the sheer number of titles they publish.

But apps like Photography Week is designed specifically for the iPad, so it is worth taking a closer look at, which I will do later today.

---

WWD reported yesterday that Condé Nast is averaging a monthly digital circulation of 540,000 issues across all tablet devices – this includes single copy sales and subscriptions. WWD is a Condé Nast title, by the way.

Condé Nast said that Cosmopolitan is leading the way, averaging 186,000 in digital circulation for the firs six months of 2012, with Wired averaging 69,000, The New Yorker 44.000.

It is hilarious to look back at the articles published at the end of 2010 which claimed that magazines were failing on the iPad. In December of 2010 WWD reported on Condé Nast's iPad circulation up to that point and described it as slumping. The original iPad was, of course, only released to the public that April.

CITIES issues new iPad app for its second issue

The great joy of the tablet editions is not the quality of the magazines – though sometimes that is the case – it is the incredible variety of publications now available. Apple, and readers, face a dilemma in that finding new content to read can be overwhelming. But there is no doubt, now that the Newsstand has reached over 4,000 titles (for the iPad, over 2,500 for the iPhone), that anyone who complains that they have nothing to read is not trying hard enough.

For many publishers, and would be publishers, the iPad is their first choice, even before print. For organizations trying to get the word out, the idea of publishing a print magazine, mailing it internationally, seems not just old fashioned, but economically unjustifiable.

CITIES the Magazine, is a new iPad app that features the second issue of the title. The app description goes out of its way to tell potential readers that this is no fancy travel magazine, but a serious digital magazine that talks about issues involving the urban environment.

CITIES The Magazine is primarily made to bring authorship about urban development issues back to its protagonists: the citizens. Each issue of the magazine can be downloaded via this app at regular intervals direct to your Apple Newsstand.

Today, in global cities, there is a growing group of mindful and purposeful people that travel from city to city for work, study and leisure. Rooted in international relationships and a new urban mobility, this social group is rich in the kind of awareness that leads them to observe, explore and analyze global urban phenomena and local urban practices. The users in our community are typically interested in architecture, environmental issues, social infrastructure planning and design; have travelled and experienced different urban realities; are conscious urban explorers; are interested or part of urban subcultures; and are especially curious about the underlying mechanisms and structures of metropolitan life.

To make things clear, CITIES is not the usual publication about design, urban-related gear and products, music or architecture...

I don't know what platform the team used to create this new digital magazine but there the page loading is a bit slow, as you will see in the video below. This occurs even after the digital edition has been open for a while.

The file size is modest as there is very little interactive content that would have driven up the size, and the magazine only uses the landscape orientation (which I like, by the way).

I think this is one of those digital magazines that will sit there inside of iTunes, but those intimately involved in the subject matter will find it and appreciate its availability inside the Apple Newsstand (where it is a free app with its issues free of charge, as well).

Mag+ releases its App SDK, opening up its system to developers for creating customized magazine apps

While there are those publishers looking for the simplest, straight forward tablet magazine solution, others would like to customize their digital products, adding features and elements limited only by their own imaginations. These digital publishers generally prefer digital publishing platforms that give them a native tablet experience – and now one of those platforms, Mag+, has opened up its SDK for developers.

"Digital publishing may still be the new kid on the block, but this industry is moving at light speed," sais Gregg Hano, CEO at Mag+.

"Customers and app users are getting ever more sophisticated in their requirements. We’re excited to extend the Mag+ offering with the app software development kit so any developer can take advantage of the Mag+ system, while creating the app of their dreams. We’re opening a new phase in digital content creation."

The SDK can be found on the Mag+ website here.

The move points out the need for media companies to be able to take advantage of developments such as this. Recruiting staff capable of software and app develop is, it seems to me, the same situation media companies found themselves in when they began hiring IT personnel back in the early days of desktop publishing, front end systems, and the early days of web publishing. A company can outsource this but they are immediately limiting themselves.

Here are some of the examples of how Mag+ sees developers taking advantage of the SDK release:

Customized Magazine Apps
With the Mag+ SDK, publishers are no longer locked into a specific set of app features and user experiences. Now they can create a unique magazine or newspaper app fully aligned with their brand, while making use of proven, best-in-class components. They can customize the menu and navigation, build their own storefront, even add their own choice of analytics or social sharing services.

Music and Movie Apps
Next-generation liner notes! With Mag+’s support for simple embedding of video and our industry-unique built-in music playlist, artists and studios can now easily create apps that deliver more than just an album or movie. They can add premium content like lyrics, video clips, behind-the-scenes content, and audience interaction in a completely unique branded app.

E-commerce
Retailers can now create catalog apps that tie directly into their e-commerce system and present the shopping experience that’s right for their clients while designing beautiful pages using the Mag+ creative tools.

Super Apps
The SDK allows developers to easily embed Mag+ functionality into another app. So a brand could offer a single app that has shopping, games, tools and a magazine. Or existing apps can be augmented with a premium content channel, deepening the value of the app and the connection with the user.

"The best part of my job," wrote Hano on the company's website, "is seeing what people do with our tools—now there’s a whole new realm of things people can create that builds on top of what we’ve been building the past 2.5 years—in this case, specifically on the new codebase we introduced in 4.0, which allowed us to neatly organize the app so we could break out particular pieces like the MIB reader and Connect component."

"I love that it continues the Mag+ philosophy of openness, creativity and experimentation. I can’t wait to see what you all do with it," Hano said.

New tablet magazine, Photography Masterclass, designs for the iPad by using replica edition techniques

What do they say, oh yeah, once is chance, twice is coincidence, third time is a trend. Well, this is the second new photography tablet magazine TNM has looked at this week that is using the Magcast platform.

Magcast is basically a replica edition-like system where the publisher uploads PDFs to the company's servers, optimizes the digital edition (meaning adding any interactive elements) and then hits "publish". The cost is around $500 per month, though the company is currently offering a discount on that price.

The way it is being used in the two magazines I've looked, first Vagabond, and now Photography Masterclass, makes this a cross between a replica edition and a tablet edition specifically designed for the iPad.

The magazine, edited by Gill Roberts, and published into Apple Newsstand using the name Hysteresis LLP, takes a template designed by Lise-Mari Coetzee, and then creates pages which are made into PDFs and uploaded to create the app. Is this native design? Yes, I would say it is. It may be exactly the kind of simply solution many readers of TNM are looking for. (There does appear to be, by the way, a symbiotic relationship between MagCast and Coetzee.)

Most publishers of replica editions do the exactly same thing, but they design first and only for print. The problem, which is obvious to all readers, is that to make the page work for the tablet, the page needs to be reduced in size. The result is a page which is nearly impossible to read without a magnifying glass or pinch-to-zoom.

I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing publishers reduce down their print magazine to a size very nearly that of the iPad. This would force art directors change their templates but would mean that the font sizes they choose for print will be replicated on the iPad – and isn't that what a replica edition should be, a replica of the print edition? Maybe we should start calling those tablet editions that shrink down their pages mini mags (or micro mags).

As for the first issue inside the app, the premiere issue weighs in at 170.14 MB, its size reduced through the use of portrait-only orientation. This becomes a bit of problem in sections where the photography is in landscape. But the orientation limit and the lack of video makes this a nice sized tablet edition.
These kinds of PDF driven tablet magazines do, I most admit, make me a little quesy. I hate the idea of giving up scrolling text boxes, and even scrolling within stories, altogether.

But California Masterclass Magazine IS easy to read and navigate, and that is one of my biggest objections to replica editions. If Magcast would continue to refine its system so that it would allow for scrolling within stories (and then swiping to the next story), would add support for the iPhone and Android, I think I would seriously consider using it myself. The system does allow for AdMob and iAds, by the way.

There are now over 100 magazines inside the Apple Newsstand using MagCast, though you will not find them searching for the name as the system requires you to have your own Apple developer license. This is a major plus, by the way, as any publisher willing to have their magazine published under the name of the app developer deserves to go out of business.