Another Step Closer to the Permanent Magazine…

The NY Times features Readius, the first roll-up e-paper display due to hit the market next year. At $359, we’re still nowhere near a price that the average consumer will pick one up and at five inches diagonal with black and white text, we’re still nowhere near the size or resolution it will need to be if magazine publishers are to embrace it, but no matter…. it’s the type of product that could birth the magazine of the next generation.

 

Long Tail Gets Longer: What it Means for Mag. Circulation

The Harvard Business Review takes a look at how Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Theory is holding up online. In a nutshell, it’s perhaps longer (more titles) and flatter (making fewer sales) than originally thought. In fact:

In music, of the 2.4 million digital tracks sold in 2007 in the U.S. (most of them through iTunes) 24 percent sold only one copy and 91 percent sold fewer than 100 copies.

The paper suggests that blockbusters continue to rule on online sites (good for the blockbusters and the aggregators) and consumers have more choices (good for the consumers) but neither of these are leading to benefits for the producers of niche content (which is pretty much the same as B2B publishers).

It’s this reason that Nxtbook uses the Nxtstand - a newsstand designed to quickly get your niche customers over to your Web site. We simply don’t think there’s success to be found on aggregation sites. At least not for our customers.

 

One Blogger’s Thoughts…

Here’s a blogger thinking about the future of print through the prism of the Nxtbook.

The Bonj Looks at Nxtbook…

A nice review of the Nxtbook - courtesy of Bonj - can be seen here.

Blogger Jill Hurst-Wahl Likes Nxtbook…

From the post:

Yes, some of these features are available in e-book readers. This,
however, works without downloading a separate reader. And imagine
marrying this with a digitized book? I can! 

Paul Conley on Nxtbook…

A nice review from Paul Conley:

Now this is kind of fun. American Business Media is posting a link to
the tradeshow daily that Folio magazine produced at the ABM Spring
Meeting. The daily is rendered Web-friendly via NXTBook, a system I
like more and more each time I use it.

Paul Conley on Nxtbook v. Texterity

Paul Conley offers some thoughts on digital editions and what he likes:

Given that, I have to say that I prefer the products created by NXTBook to those of Texterity. I just really like that audio file of a page being turned when I move through the "magazine."