Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps

From MIT Technology Review, a summary of the publishing industry’s ill-fated dalliance with iPad apps, including first hand experiences.

“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted US$124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.”

If the moment is not here already, then it’s getting very close to the time when we can definitively declare the first generation of iPad magazine apps to be a failure. Full article here.

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