Posted on Mar 5, 2012 in Tablet and Mobile | 1 comment

I just returned from Publishing Expo 2012 in London, where I was interested (among many other things) to see what newspaper and magazine publishers were doing in the area of offline delivery, or content-to-go. Print has long had the advantage of being able to travel easily with the reader. So in the transition from print to digital delivery, the ability to save stories on a device for offline viewing (available when there is no Internet connection, such as in a subway or on an airplane) is still a necessary requirement. It’s worth mentioning that subway systems and airlines are already experimenting with wireless Internet, so “offline storage options” can be considered a transitional technology until the day, not too far off, when the Internet cloud will available almost everywhere. When that happens, offline portability of news will cease to matter. This is already a vision that companies like Microsoft and Google are touting for corporate information and office applications. But today I am interested in what publishers are doing with digital editions–the online version laid out more or less precisely like their print edition–and how many are moving toward tablet and mobile apps capable of storing articles on the device. Last week I received an email from Ziff-Davis, a reasonably forward-thinking magazine publisher, announcing that they were abandoning digital editions for one of the titles I subscribe to: “To ensure we focus our innovation on channels that have proven most useful for our readers, we will no longer be sending .pdf versions of CIO Insight, otherwise known as Digital Editions. We experimented with this over the last few months and have now decided to put it on hold. We expect you will continue to enjoy our always improving content through the major channels highlighted above.” Those “major channels” included their web site content and their tablet and mobile editions. In a recent post I wrote about how different media need to be supported by different interface models; online is a very different user experience from print, and just placing the print edition online (as a PDF) isn’t really a valid model for the way people want to consume articles online....

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