Author: Bill Trippe (Page 13 of 23)

Magazines have been doing electronic publishing for a long time. Magazine articles, for example, have been in databases for at least 20 years, and some of the magazine publishers were the earliest to leverage the Web–and some with tremendous success even at the very beginning. (I was at ZDNet briefly in the 1990s when the traffic seemed to double monthly.) Yet some other magazines have been laggards, nervous perhaps about what the digital product might do to the print. Still others have developed interesting mixed models, where some content in the print ends up free on the Web while other content is available only to print subscibers. And others have developed wholly different digital products that share little more than the brand with the print product. There is no end to the potential models, and perhaps for very good reason–every audience is different and every mix of advertisers is different.

I happened on a very thoughtful discussion about magazine digital publishing models. Staci Kramer of paidContent.org moderated “a fireside chat” with Jim Spanfeller, CEO of Forbes.com and Jeff Price, President of SI.com at the SIIA conference in NYC earlier this week. The video can be watched in its entirety here; it’s about 30 minutes long, and well worth your time if you are thinking about these issues.

On May 9, I was one of several speakers at an Innodata-Isogen event, “Future Tense – Emerging Trends in Publishing Workflow Management.” They have now posted the presentations and accompanying podcasts. Registration is required, but there are a number of interesting presentations and case studies, including ones from The New Yorker, Houghton Mifflin, Time Out New York, and Harvard Business School Publishing.

Our news includes some details about the launch of QuarkXPress 7.0, but I have to ask if this is at all significant to the desktop publishing world at this point. Most–maybe even all–publishers I work with have made the move to Adobe InDesign. Some publishers are holding on to a few licenses of QuarkXPress for older books and products that might need to be updated, but all new products are being done using InDesign. Moreover, Adobe Creative Suite, which combines InDesign, Illustrator, PhotoShop, and other products, is simply too attractive an offering with very attractive pricing. Quark has nothing comparable to counter with.
For larger publishers, there are also very viable workgroup options with InDesign, which wasn’t true a few years ago. The combination of InDesign with InCopy for writers and editors is gaining traction, and there solutions such as K4 from Managing Editor and Smart Connection Enterprise from Woodwing for larger groups. These systems are often replacing Quark’s QPS solution as the publishers drop QuarkXPress for InDesign.
Quark 6.0 took forever to come out. Quark 7.0 took forever to come out. In the meantime, InDesign has really taken hold. So I have my doubts that Quark can overcome this.
Finally, there is a cautionary tale in all of this. Quark was famously arrogant in its heyday, and did a lot to alienate customers. When I wrote about the movement to InDesign for The Seybold Report in December 2004 (subscription required), industry maven Kate Binder said, “Never discount people’s absolute, bitter hatred of Quark the company. It’s genuinely a factor.”

Frank does a great job of filtering the news and getting it out to our readers. We get several press releases a day, and on busy days it can be a dozen or more. When one of our conferences or a trade show like AIIM is coming up, the flood of news can be pretty overwhelming. To make it more challenging, most of the news ends up in our email in-boxes–along with dozens of other legitimate email and, some days, hundreds of spam. I have pretty good spam filtering, but sometimes it overflags, and a vendor email will end up in my junk mail folder. Every week or so, I go through the spam and flag these email addresses for my white list.
So I have a proposal for vendors. Come up with an RSS feed for your news, and I will subscribe to it. A few of you already do this, and I have subscribed, but most of you don’t. So add an RSS feed for your press releases and let us know–by email of course. 😉
While you are thinking about it, you could consider a more general RSS feed for other elements of your Web site–events, new documents, and so forth. I am sure your customers would appreciate it too.