Age of Tablets
Fortune magazine devotes its current cover to the future of reading. Here's the blurb: "Tablets? Smartphones? Netbooks? They could all save newspapers, books, and magazines — or destroy them. Or both. Plus: What five media and tech luminaries think. By Josh Quittner." Let's look inside.
Quittner on advertising I: "No one looks at ads online. (Name one you've seen in the past week.)"
Quittner on advertising II: "The only media company that's making money these days is Google, whose $23.6 billion in revenue last year dwarfed the entire magazine industry's."
Quittner on advertising III: "I suspect ads will work so well on tablets that even if subscription or pay-per-read models don't work, many publishers will be able to thrive on advertising revenue alone."
For quite some time now, Josh Quittner has been pushing the theory that the "Age of Tablets" will give print media one last bite at the apple, and to put the debate into perspective he points out that the first magazine was published in 1731, the year Charles Darwin was born. (Good for a pub quiz, that.) And who are the "five media and tech luminaries" Quittner consults on the future of reading? Steven Brill, co-founder of Press+; Katharine Weymouth, publisher of the Washington Post; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia and the novelist and broadcaster, Kurt Andersen. None has anything really original to say so it's left for Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape and of the $300 million Andreessen Horowitz venture fund, to give the drowsy reader a jolt:
"The problem is that the successful tablet is also going to have a really good web browser on it. So am I going to pay $5 for something I downloaded through the App Store when I could go on the web — using the exact same device — to get it for free? Um, the answer to that is no."
Bottom line: Publishing companies have failed to re-imagine their industry in an era of accelerated change. The tired fix of cost cutting, Quittner say, does not address the core problems. The music industry was in that place a decade ago and because if its huge imagination fail, someone else is now leading the race to collect the magical 10,000,000,000. Less a case of one last bite at the apple than badly bitten by the apple. There's a message and a moral there.
