The state of the art in digital publishing

I would offer free advice and con­sul­tancy to the ital­ian pub­lish­ing group Il Sole 24 ore.

Dig­i­tal mag­a­zines or news­pa­per are the new trend­ing mar­ket where every­one would like to be. Sub­scrip­tions are flow­ing and media con­sumers from the upper class are mov­ing from printed paper to dig­i­tal plat­forms, with a respectable pref­er­ence for the iOS one.

Sim­ple one-click order­ing, porta­bil­ity, easy­ness and crisp rgb images are lead­ing cus­tomers to the cloud. Well, they are will­ing to move to the cloud.

Pub­lish­ers are expe­ri­enc­ing a new way of slav­ery, the dig­i­tal one com­ing from Cuper­tino and the lack of pro­fes­sion­als in their houses. In the printed edi­tions lus­tres of expe­ri­ence removed almost any kind of prob­lem to the process of print­ing, cut­ting costs and upgrad­ing qual­ity. Then went the hard days of cut­ting costs, goods and inks, salaries and paper costs, and we lost quality.

Todays we have great cloud based ser­vices and nice piece of hard­ware to watch things, that are almost inex­pen­sive and first of all they are fast. So fast that they can cre­ate trou­bles to publishers.

Todays we lack of com­pe­tence on the dig­i­tal media, on the new print­ing busi­ness asso­ci­ated with them, you really can’t get new pros­sion­als and skilled peo­ple to let them do the high qual­ity work for the sin­ergy between print and digital.

Il Sole 24 ore devel­oped an app for the iPad which is slow, costy and com­plis to Apple’s rules on dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing. They sell at 0,79€ instead of 1,20€ and Apple gets 30% of that.

Basi­cally it is just a PDF viewer with pinch&zoom capa­bil­i­ties, with no extra con­tent, nor any cross media func­tion­al­ity, nor any social inter­ac­tion tool. PDF is badly cre­ated export­ing a low res from the dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing work­flow. Color man­age­ment is so weird you should give a glance by your­self. Maybe none of them ever con­verted a color space to another, or tried work­ing with rgb images. The fact is that images are just… black, over sat­u­rated, no gra­di­ents at all, wheter they should be nicer than the printed ones com­ing from the web off­set press.

Peo­ple can only rely on the new york times, the finan­cial times, wired or flip­board to get some­thing inter­est­ing out of the whole dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing market.

I bet this is not what peo­ple wanted when they saw Steve flash­ing out a tablet from his pocket.

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