Canary in the coal mine
The Age
Thursday March 24, 2011
A US photographic magazine publisher has taken to tablets. LAST week the newsagency in our local multi-level shopping centre closed down. And the Angus and Robertson bookstore on the ground floor has an uncertain future.We don't want to read too much into this but it could be that our shopping centre is the canary in the paper-and-ink publishing mine. According to David Spivak, the publisher of American fine-art photography magazine Focus: "... the business model of printing magazines for sale on news stands is becoming outdated and obsolete".Spivak's essay on the woes of paper publishing and distribution is in the current issue of Focus, a bi-monthly, high-quality showcase for fine-art photography. Almost all the advertising is by galleries that sell photographs, with little of the usual camera and gadget advertising common to the "how-to" type of camera magazine. Spivak is proud of the print quality he has achieved in collaboration with his printer but it has all become unsustainable. The business figures are horrific.He sells about 3750 copies an issue and to achieve that figure he must print and distribute 15,000. The unsold copies are returned and pulped. He pays the return freight.He deals with three distributors who have a non-competitive arrangement that allows them to take up to 60 per cent of the cover price. He pays the freight and if the magazine is warehoused between delivery and distribution, he pays for the storage.The cost of paper is increasing but worse than the price is the waste: 240,000 sheets of 63.5-centimetre by 98-centimetre high-quality paper is destroyed for every issue.By the time Spivak has paid his staff, printer, carriers, distributors and the retailers, his own profit is zero. Advertising revenue probably just covers the losses on production and distribution.Spivak's solution is tablet publishing using Zinio (zinio.com) to turn his page layouts into a form for electronic distribution. At the moment, that means publishing to the Apple iPad. He will still print the magazine but only for subscribers. Distribution of the paper copy will be direct by mail, with no returns and no waste. If you subscribe to the iPad edition through Zinio, it costs a reasonable $5 an issue and delivery anywhere in the world will be the same day as in the US.While Spivak loves his print quality, he also likes the fact that the iPad, with its 326-lines-per-inch resolution, is almost as good as his 400-line printed edition. And, as he says, the perceived image quality on the iPad is brilliant both for monochrome and colour. Interactivity is an added benefit.Spivak even has a thought for us: "If you're from Australia, how would you like to purchase a digital subscription to Focus for the same price my next-door neighbour would pay?" Well, yes please! It's just a pity about the newsagent.
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