Rosalea Barker: Get yer apps on!

Okay. So here’s the thing. In the first couple of weeks of April, apparently, the US will be flooded with iPads and the publishing world as we know it will change. You need only watch this video of the Wired/Adobe Systems magazine reader app, which was unveiled at TED last month, to be blown away by how this trounces existing electronic reader devices as well as publishers’ present websites.

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid56328629001?bclid=10175001001&bctid=66775419001

Now, I’m not a technical writer, and you can judge for yourself whether you’d want to take any notice whatsoever of what I write about gizmos, given that back in 2005 I bravely stated “I have seen the future of TV and it is PSP.” Not only that, but I own not one but two versions of Sony’s MYLO “communicator” and the only further development the company seems to have put into them is to cannibalize the body of the 2007 version for the PSP. I don’t have an iPod or an iPhone, and my cellphone doesn’t respond to fingerpointing.

When the iPad was unveiled to much fanfare recently, my only thought was: Why would someone want to lug that great big thing around, with its fragile screen that would shatter if you dropped it, and which must need constant cleaning from all the sticky finger wipes across it? So, when I heard about a panel discussion where “Top multimedia journalists and trainers talk about new technology that’s coming down the pike, such as the iPad, and how it will change journalists’ jobs and the way their publications operate”, I thought I’d better trot along and see the pikelets for myself.

Bizarrely (in retrospect), I interpreted “change journalists’ jobs” to mean that the iPad must have some features that will make a journalist’s job easier. Maybe it could recognize handwriting and turn my scribbled notes into a text file of some sort. Could it simultaneously record the interview/event I was making notes about and automatically link the two together? Honestly, I don’t know what I was thinking—the presentation by Priya Ganapati, who writes for Wired.com, was just a shill for technology that Apple, Adobe, and the Conde Nast publishing company hope is going to reap rich monetary rewards.

Thankfully, there was someone in the audience who had some hard-headed questions about this. Describing himself as the publisher of a number of very successful California magazines, he pointed out that their smartphone app business brings in merely a tenth of the amount that their monetized-ad websites do. Why would creating an app for the iPad fare any better? When I asked Ganapati how much the iPad app that Conde Nast is bringing out in June would cost, she thought it would be around $2.99.

I have to confess to total ignorance about apps. I’m from an age when “app” was short for “application” and meant the software that your computer was running. But the word seems to have morphed into meaning not just the software that anybody can write—having downloaded Apple’s Software Developer Kit—but also the content. Am I wrong about this? Having downloaded my fancy-nancy Wired app, to enable my iPad to present the magazine to me, do I then have to also pay to download each issue? After all, the iTunes software on my computer is just an app, and I still have to pay for every tune I download.

Well, THERE’s a cautionary tale for you. Look what happened to the music industry’s publication platform—the CD—once iTunes came on the scene. Just like now, the big companies were being actively seduced into putting their wares on iTunes. Is a publication platform that consists of paper and ink going to fare any better? Not that I think the two are directly comparable—after all, magazines and newspapers aren’t pirated in the way that CDs can be. Rip and burn a magazine and all you get is ashes. Nobody ever photocopied one and tried to sell it.

So if newspapers and magazines are getting into the app business, it’s not in order to protect their territory. It is to monetize it on a new platform from the ground up. Is this then, the beginning of the end of the Internet as we know it? Publishers of news content have found a way to make you pay for all the content, just as you do for their print editions. And with other companies such as Dell bringing out tablets that will have the same capability of downloading apps, we’ll have just recreated at the application software level the same divide that pitted operating systems against each other. Not only that, but the device makers—and perhaps the telecommunications companies over whose virtual railway lines the apps must travel—will control what does and doesn’t succeed. As Jonathan Zittrain wrote in a recent Financial Times article:

But consider: the world wide web started as, and remains, an app. Its first versions were written by Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist who was unaffiliated with any software or hardware vendor. How worthy of approval would Wikipedia have seemed when it boasted only seven articles - dubiously hoping that the public would magically provide the rest?

Here’s Ganapati’s advice to publishers: Get your apps out there NOW. The App Store for the iPhone boasted 500 apps when it opened in July 2008; nowadays there are upwards of 150,000. Who is going to find your app if you’re not there first? It’s the app economy, baby, get to it!

--PEACE—

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

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