A year from now, I believe, the majority of us will have purchased an e-reader.
Personally, I’m waiting for the Apple® version, which will once again establish the platform standards. It will, once again, focus our attention on self- contained applications (the app store). These applications will, among other things, reinvigorate the gaming, magazine, and advertising industries. Just as iTunes® and iPods® re-energized the way we procured and listened to our music, 3G, touch-screen, and Wi-Fi e-readers will pull the publishing industry from its self-inflicted downward spiral.
The gestalt experience of consuming a novel, a magazine or a newspaper’s crossword puzzle does not translate well to a desktop or laptop-rendered website. These pursuits will, however, translate beautifully into portable, digital reproductions that can be read and viewed in the format for which they were intended. Even better, for those of us who embrace the “save our trees” mindset while still valuing credible information and entertainment, we’ll once again be willing to actually subscribe to these e-publications.
With distribution and reproduction costs at $0.00, the overhead then becomes content-creation and design. And when a $19.95-a- year subscription structure actually becomes a profitable business model, rather than a recipe for disaster, the dynamics of the industry will change.
Toss advertising revenues into the equation, and a $9.95 yearly subscription fee, becomes a reality.
While weekly business- and news magazines scramble to re-position themselves as “in-depth,” and daily newspapers find themselves finishing out of the money in the information race, e-print versions of Esquire®, Men’s Health®, GQ®, Car and Driver®, and ELLE® - to name just a few - will once again demand our attention. The advertisements that engaged us in our analog world will again lay claim to our e-consideration. These “greener” versions will displace the carbon footprint of the obsolete platforms withering and dying today - while at the same time enhancing their ability to engage us as never before.
So get ready, all of you creative teams, designers, and advertising-industry diehards. Print-style advertising is coming back; it’s just that, this time, it can also be a video.
