Subcompartmentalized publishing

The other day, someone's Twitter recommendation convinced me to add Craig Mod's essay Subcompact Publishing to my Readability queue. And after reading it, I recommend you read it too. It's full of interesting stuff (I didn't know what skeuomorphism was!) and interesting points for librarians to keep in mind ("Content without a public address is non-existent in the eyes of all the inter-operable sharing mechanisms that together bind the web."). But still, I think it got at least one thing fundamentally wrong.

Mainly, the article presents Marco Arment's iOS app/publication The Magazine as an example of a "subcompact publishing." Roughly, that means it uses a simple, innovative, forward-looking approach rather than trying to adapt existing business models to a changed technology environment. Mod provides an eight-point list of qualities associated with subcompact publishing as a starting point, and it seems like a decent list as far as it goes. (Conveniently, The Magazine illustrates all eight points.)

I would add another quality, though, on which The Magazine fails: interoperability. You need an iOS device, preferably an iPad, to read it. This definitely does not feel like a model of The Way Forward for the Publishing World. Most publishers would probably prefer to sell to readers, regardless of what device they own. Selling content packaged in a platform-specific app might seem like an innovative fusion of programming and publishing, but it limits your market before you even start. Using Apple's Newsstand may work just fine for The Magazine, but there's likely a reason it's "under-leveraged."

[Speaking for myself, The Magazine looks pretty interesting, but I don't have an iPad. I do have an iPod touch, but I'd prefer to read long articles on a desktop machine or my Kindle Fire. So there's some friction there. And there's a lot of other interesting stuff to read that I can queue up in Readability.]

One other point: Mod sensibly advocates for "digital-aware subscription prices." But publishers should keep in mind that when it comes to newspapers and magazines, the content is usually a loss-leader, and delivering advertisements to readers is the real product. (With books, the content is the product.) "Digital-aware" probably means that a paid product should not rely on advertising, so digital publishers lose that revenue source as they save on production costs.