Rolling Stone co-founder slams publishers for embracing Apple's iPad - Page 4

Stores could probably live with a lower markup if they charged each customer $500 for the right to shop there.

Apple do many things well, but this is not one of them. In fact it's awful.

In Australia, 38 book stores have closed recently due to unprofitability...
http://www.smh.com.au/business/hundr...303-1bgfx.html

Ya know when the book came out everyone feared it and thought it would fail.
ebooks emagazines will not be mainstream as long as we dinosaurs from the industrial age are still around. After we're gone the new generation that only knows the information age, will treat the printed books like a collectible at best

true that! Here in the US borders is gone and Barnes and Noble is up for a firesale and the new buyer is only interested in the nook.

I get it that the printed books will be around for a while, but it's not the future.

i miss tower records, waterstones, and virgin megastores. all great places where i could read the latest copy of rolling stone magazine for free.

What's the price for print costs, distribution and reseller's cut?

Only closing 30% of their stores.

Yeah I agree with you for once. We need Magazine rack section, preferably in iBookstore.

Totally off-topic, but having seen the Pink Floyd Immersion Sets, I think if CDs have to go, they ought to go out with a bang like that!

Even Nick Mason said that this maybe the last time they can milk the cash cow via the physical format, so they want to release these immersive sets!

Like Playboy Magazine did with their WebApp sold through their "store".

Why do we "need" what we already have?

it only matters to them if it's not in your industry.

The reason why the dot-coms failed going up against brick-and-mortar stores was because they thought they were going to change people's shopping habits. But it was obvious that online shopping didn't present anything new in buying when compared to physical presence as people bought using mail order, telephone sales, etc. via catalogs for over 100 years. That's how Sears became the largest retailer back in its day.

After the dot-com bust, when retailers' online operations were operational, who's businesses suffered as the economy recovered? The catalogers.

Don't listen to VCs and entrepreneurs talk about what the next big thing is. Check with customers first. Always.

But don't consider brick-and-mortars free and clear yet. As trust in online purchases grows, and the need to physically handle merchandise before purchasing wanes, particularly for commodities, a physical presence becomes less convenient for increasingly ADHD and privacy-minded consumers. Look at what online book sales are doing to the book retail industry.


So Borders hasn't closed over 200 stores and filed for reorganization due to weakness in book sales? What was it then?


Magazines are worse than books because they're generally considered time-sensitive. While keeping a stack of magazines might be important to show social status or to pre-occupy patients in the waiting room, an increasingly green-conscious society is not as keen on tossing dead trees into the dumpster or lugging them to the mythical recycling center.


I don't know what part of the globe you're at, but around here most people don't have hundreds of years of experience with anything, let alone the printed press. And with almost 20 years exposure to the Internet, and the visual quality of print finally being present in online media, another 10 years should close the book on printed media for general usage.


Living in Florida, I can tell you paper doesn't survive rain nor hurricanes well and are a hassle to salvage as well as to transport and store when it isn't serving as your umbrella.

I agree paper offers a great deal of convenience and versatility, and as the publisher of a notebook app for the Mac I'm increasing its feature set for print/paper. But digital media offers more than an order of magnitude more convenience and versatility than print.

Paper serves its purpose. But claims it will continue to be the primary rendering and distribution medium for content in the face of superior formats are as defensible as Palm's marketshare in the face of the iPhone.

Roling Stone-the magazine of drug drenched losers.

I'm loving this attention I'm getting. Keep it up guys. Bring up your counter arguments.

As I said, and had been also said in several articles, including a couple you linked to, Apple has just now gotten its publishing act together, and there are already a fair number of subs available, or that will be soon. As far as some of those other numbers go, most are still just guesses, and suppositions.

But what isn't mentioned in these articles is whether these subs are just available on the physical readers themselves (they are not), or on the apps available for the iPad (they are). So the questions is what really matters here. Apple offers iBooks as something available for its users as an incentive to buy iPads, on which Apple makes a good profit.

On the other hand, Amazon and B&N are assumed to be selling their book readers at a loss, or at best, break-even, because they need to make money on their book, and magazine sales. Since I use all three apps for buying and reading books on my iPad, Apple wins this round.

The other problem with
Kindle and
Nook reader sales is that both companies refuse to say how many they've sold, so we have no idea. To say that the color Nook is already 64% of the companies hardware's sales means little without knowing what that means. But we do know how many iPads Apple sells.

as far as the 1.5 million goes, what percentage is subs, and what percentage is single sales? They don't say, but it matters. Until about a week or so ago, most mag single prices were $5-much too high. Now most are $2. So we'll see how that changes the sales numbers. And until that same week or so ago, there were almost no subs in iBooks at all, and the few that were there cost an outrageous amount, so it's tough to compare.

Now that pricing is more evenly distributed amongst the players, we'll see in the next couple of months or so.

And as far as you expecting me to say what I do, well, I always expect you to find something that purports to find Apple at a disadvantage. You aren't exactly fair minded.

Nobody knows how many Nook owners there are.

Barnes & Noble does. They said there's "million's", which would have to be at least two million or they'd be liars.

We still don't know how many. Same thing with the Kindle. It does matter.

But then, I've subscribed to three magazines through Zinio, on my iPad. What does that count as? After all, you can't do that on either the Kindle, or the nook. I'm also waiting for a number of subs to expire, so I can subscribe to them electronically.

Umm, wouldn't that be a point for B&N?
You can't buy magazines from the Appstore on anything but an Apple device.

And I've never seen evidence anywhere that B&N was selling Nooks at a loss. Any source for that?


Why would it matter? And yes, "it's tough to compare" when Apple won't announce how many subs or individual copies it's sold. Sales figures from the Appstore trickle out only in articles like these.

[I]But to repeat my earlier claim, so far B&N seems to have done a better job for the magazine guys than Apple based on the what I've found in my searches. You still haven't posted any evidence disputing any of this either, so I'm not sure on what basis you're questioning the articles other than you just don't like the conclusions.


I completely agree that sometime in the future things could change. The mobile market is so fluid that one misstep or masterstroke can change the whole game. The Appstore might someday become the best source for magazine publishers to get results. But that time doesn't appear to be now.

In essence, just because Apple may not currently be delivering the results that publisher's are looking for doesn't mean that no one else can. B&N's NookColor might be on the right track based on what the mag execs say.

One of the links you posted said that. I don't remember which one right now. I've also read it a number of times elsewhere. These companies are interested in selling the books and magazines. The devices are just a way of doing that, which is why they have apps for iOS devices, as well as for the Mac, Windows machines, Android devices, etc. If they were so concerned about selling, and making a profit on the devices, they would not be doing that.

The fact that you can't buy iOS magazines and books anywhere else, if they're exclusive, is a point in Apple's favor as well. They get to sell tens of billions of dollars worth of iOS devices, where they make billions of dollars of profits, and these extra services help them to do that.

I'm not saying that the Nook and Kindle are bad. They are not, for what they do. But Apple isn't really interested in making a lot of money from the software, just the hardware. But Apple fullfills the first rule of business, which is to make a profit on every service and product, no matter how small. Apple has no loss leaders. So they try to make from what we read, about a 5% profit on iTunes and App Store sales. That keeps them in the black, but it's a pretty low profit margin for Apple, which made a 21.5% net margin last year.

Somehow, Amazon and B&N need to do better than that 5%. I don't know how they are doing it, but I hope they are.


Apple doesn't have to announce it, the magazine publishers have been announcing it, as you very well know. You don't have to try to be clever and think you're throwing my words back at me, which you seem to think you're doing half the time, because you still get it wrong.


If you read your own articles, and what I've said, you would stop bothering with that. It's only been during the past two weeks or so that the publishers and Apple have gotten together on this, and the results are just as good, if not better than what we're seeing elsewhere.

You've been on this site for a while, and you must have read the articles telling what is happening between Apple and the publishers. Don't pretend you haven't. I don't need to repeat what you've undoubtedly already read, but don't want to acknowledge.


This entire field is still really new, like where the Internet was in late 1995. It's way too early to know how things will shake out. Now that B&N has been bought, what will they be doing?

Apple will remain the big cheese. Books and magazine sales are almost of no importance to them, except as how they affect sales of their devices. As iPads will sell very well, with high profits, that's what Apple cares about. And as there will continue to be several book stores on those devices, iPad users have the best of all worlds, as long as book reading is just a part of what they want to do with a device. I'm convinced that Apple will be happy with book and magazine sales as long as people aren't driven to other devices instead.

If people just want a small, light, and cheap reader, even one in B/W, that sucks with anything using color, then these $100 plus readers will do fine. Go to color, and the price more than doubles. By then, you will start looking at the $499 iPad.

I think we both need to start using Yojimbo.

http://www.barebones.com/products/yojimbo/

I had been using Evernote, but I'm not great with clipping links and quotes as I come across them. Don't know how many times I'd wished I thought make a record of one I hadn't.

Yes, I read the issues here and on other sites. I wasn't looking for nor stating a reason why things may not be quite right yet, assuming they aren't. It would be supposition anyway. As DED might say, it's akin to vaporware if it doesn't exist in the hear and now. I simply made the argument for what is rather than what might be. We just ended up talking in two different timeframes.

As it stands now the ability of B&N to deliver results for the magazines appears to outshine Apple. But I'll agree with your point that selling magazines isn't a primary objective for Apple anyway. Probably no harm if they never sold a magazine. On the other hand B&N has to be better at it than Apple if they're to survive.

BTW, there's been no sale of B&N. There's a Liberty Media offer on the table and under consideration. But no acceptance AFAIK.

That's not actually going to help. I bookmark every page I think is important, and have them organized as well. It's not difficult. But you can't bookmark every page you read. Sometimes when you do, you get a 404 when you go back, so that doesn't always help either. I don't see how it would have helped here.

Well, as B&N had put themselves up for sale a year ago, and this has been the only Real offer, the writing is it will likely go through. The board seems to be in favor.

You can have it auto-save the contents of the page so even if it's deleted or altered you can have the original in your local DB.

I've got literally thousands of pages bookmarked. Do I want all of those on a drive? Not really.

Agreed, periodicals are likely to change much faster. Murdoch started the whole thing by charging online for the times, I mean otherwise no one buys the Times and it is unsustainable.