Digital magazines still have adverts non-shock, a response to Marco Arment’s Double dipping, where he complained about adverts in iOS magazine apps, was one of the most-read and commented-on (and also divisive) things on this blog for months. Those in the publishing industry backed my stance, and readers tended to offer a range of opinions, from siding with Arment to agreeing wholeheartedly with me.

Arment has since followed up, clarifying some points and linking to an article by Nicolas Barajas, who attempts to guess at some costs and how digital magazines without adverts could be funded. Barajas initially has some good news, at least in theory:

With [my] figures — a staff of 29, 22 illustrations and five contributed works per issue — the bill due at the end of the year is $3,642,200. You’ll need just over 20K subscribers to break even.

I say “in theory”, because 20,000 subscribers would wipe out a fairly large chunk of the UK’s niche magazine industry in one fell swoop. In the US, magazines sometimes start panicking when circulations dip under 100,000, but UK niche mags rely less on subscriptions and more on retail, hence being able to survive with lower readership levels.

Anyway, Barajas then admits:

But in order to make the numbers a lot neater, I’ve eliminated a lot of basic things: There’s no talk of renting space; we haven’t actually built a website, iPad app, or content management system; maintenance and support costs for a server and subscription model haven’t been touched. We’ve assumed our writers submit nothing but flawless prose, thoroughly fact-checked and without a single typo or grammatical error.

And that is a problem. To be honest, for many of the mags I write for, the guesswork Barajas makes for editorial staff is a little excessive, but the lack of taking into account infrastructure of any sort means you’re talking 20,000 subscribers always being around to fund just the editorial content of his imaginary digital New Yorker—and that’s a big ask. Throw in infrastructure as well and that subscriber base would have to be much higher. That’s a bigger ask.

Arment’s response has been to change tack slightly:

[…] the bigger issue is that I actually don’t want all of that content. Obviously, this is a personal detail, and it’s not The New Yorker’s problem, but I skip the Goings On section and most of the Reviews. I don’t need most of the Talk, and I wouldn’t notice if half of the illustrations were missing. Less than half of the proposed staff is working on content that I’ll read: mainly, the feature articles.

He and others have hinted at magazines opening up their content and allowing cherry-picking. You’d pay just for the features you want to read, or for specific sections. In a sense, that’s more or less a commercialised Instapaper, so it’s no wonder Arment likes such an idea. It’s not something I’d dismiss out of hand, but I do wonder where that would leave the industry as a whole. There would certainly be a danger of ensuring every article would be commercially viable on its own, potentially reducing risk and following a more web-like ‘eyeballs are all that matter’ model. You’d lose ‘browsing’, hitting upon something you actually find interesting in a section you don’t often read, or about a subject you don’t usually find appealing. And rather than coherent publications geared towards certain demographics, you’d instead end up with an editor curating content for smaller and smaller niche markets.

It doesn’t sound very magazine-like—more, as I said, a commercial Instapaper or a bit like Kindle Singles. Perhaps that is what people want—I certainly don’t have any answers there. The one thing I do sense is that there’s a massive shift ahead for publishing, but no-one knows what it is yet. Until we find out, we’re going to continue seeing existing models being reworked slightly for digital, frustrating the likes of Arment and like-minded people, yet also delighting those who still enjoy magazines but don’t have space to store bound paper editions.

Mat Honan for Gizmodo:

I’m reading 1Q84, Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited new book. In hardback, it’s 944 pages and weighs several pounds. I am a pasty blogger with weak arms and soft hands, so the Kindle version seemed like a no-brainer.

Except the Kindle version is hobbled. Extensively hobbled, in fact. It lops off two of Amazon’s best features, public highlights and, far worse, the ability to read on all my devices.

Honan says he started reading on one device, wanted to pick up on another and got an error stating ‘License Limit Reached’. Amazon subsequently said that the device limit for 1Q84 is one. Clearly, this is down to the publisher, but I’m surprised Amazon has allowed this. Yet Amazon customer service confirmed the device limit to Honan and added that device limits vary by publisher.

I’ve not heard of this restriction on Kindle before, so I guess it must be fairly rare. That said, it is troubling. The point of a digital ecosystem is to free us of restrictions. Buy a digital book for Kindle, and you should be able to read it on any device for which you have Kindle access. Restricting it to one device is like the bad old days of digital music, where publishers demanded you rebuy per device. That’s great for publishers, in their deranged minds, but it’s not something modern consumers will have any truck with, and it’s also damaging to the systems publishers increasingly rely on.

The path forward for media is clear: re-engage with consumers by making your content affordable, accessible and easy to transfer between devices. Lock users into a system (iBooks, Kindle, Comixology) if you absolutely must, but don’t think you’ll get away with locking things down further per device, or you’ll just drive people to other publishers and, for your content, torrents.

You’ve got to love old rockers. Pete Townshend comes across a bit like today’s Mr Bonkers, blaming iTunes for not offering everything a record label does, and instead acting like an uncaring shop. That’s probably because iTunes is, in fact, an uncaring shop and not a record label.

The interview is summarised on Mac Observer (hat tip: Adam Banks, and full transcript on MusicWeek) and it’s quite illuminating:

Mr. Townshend, the leader of iconic rock ban The Who, argued that once upon a time, the music industry as a whole (including publishing and record labels) used to offer eight different forms of support to artists, including editorial guidance, financial support, creative nurture, manufacturing, publishing, marketing, distribution, and payment of royalties.

He said that if you look at artists who distribute through iTunes, they get only the last two forms of support, distribution and payment of royalties.

Because iTunes isn’t a record label.

“Now is there really any good reason why,” he asked, “just because iTunes exists in the wild west internet land of Facebook and Twitter, it can’t provide some aspect of these services to the artists whose work it bleeds like a digital vampire [UK bank] Northern Rock for its enormous commission?”

Because iTunes isn’t a record label. As for it bleeding artists’ work like a digital vampire, iTunes is one of the main reasons why anyone pays for digital music at all. It wasn’t the first of its kind, but it rapidly embedded itself in the collective consciousness of device and Mac/PC owners, and it made it natural to spend a few quid on a digital album download, rather than go hunting for a torrent, which would be much closer to Townshend’s digital vampire.

Townshend goes on to say Apple should employ A&R people to guide artists, and so perhaps he isn’t misunderstanding what the iTunes Store is, but is instead arguing that Apple should be assisting artists due to the label ecosystem crashing and burning in slow motion. I suspect he suggests Apple because of its clout, since he doesn’t make the same demands of Amazon, WalMart or Tesco.

The thing is, Apple’s never really had much truck with creating media—it just provides the platforms on which people can create and sell—and so there’s no proof it’d even be any good at being a record label. In iOS gaming, Apple’s made a single game—Texas Hold’em—and it simply lets devs get on with it, rather than interfering. To that end, I can’t see Apple going all ‘record label’ in the music space, nor really why it should. It’s providing an outlet—an easy way for people to buy. And you can bet if Apple did pump resources into helping music artists, it’d alienate people working in other fields, lacking such support, and probably also piss off remaining record labels, too, potentially making things worse for many musicians.

Townshend continues to offer suggestions:

He would also like to see Apple choose 500 worthy artists a year and provide them with free Macs and the training to use them when creating music. Those artists could be identified by the above-mentioned A&R folks, who should then follow the progress of those artists throughout the year.

So, Apple should not only provide advice, but also free hardware. What about their own radio station?

“Yes Apple, give artists some streaming bandwidth,” he said. “It will sting, but do it. You will get even more aluminum solid state LURVE for doing so.”

How about groupies and drugs?

…

OK, so there is some kind of line.

Still, Townshend does come up with at least one nugget of solid-gold sense:

The biggest change that he advocated during his speech was that Apple stop requiring independent bands to go through third party aggregators to be in the iTunes Store. He believes Apple should pay these artists directly so that more of the money from their music downloads gets to them. He acknowledged that some of the third party aggregators offer some label-like services, but argued that most are just middlemen sitting between the artists and iTunes.

This is the one thing that’s always surprised me a little about the iTunes Store. You can make and upload your own game, and, unless I’m mistaken, you can self-publish a book. But music? Too bad. You have to pay a third-party service a buck or more per track, for each store you want a presence on. And that isn’t a particularly modern, ‘Apple’ way of thinking.

Orn Malik for GigaOM is shocked that terrible free game Cut the Birds (which manages to simultaneously rip off Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja) ended up on the App Store. I’m not. Despite reports that Apple’s policing of the store is draconian, it’s anything but these days. It’s commonplace to see IP rips on the store, and I’ve chanced upon lifts from Pac-Man, Mario and other famous brands.

Generally, Apple’s pretty good at removing infringing properties when challenged (and that was even the case with an indie dev I know whose game and game name were stolen wholesale), and it’s tough to think what Apple should be doing instead. It could act as more of a gatekeeper, rejecting more IP that obviously infringes, but such action is likely to be inconsistently applied, and most likely to only protect big companies by default. Furthermore, it’s not like Apple’s alone in this—myriad cases of IP theft also exist on the Android Marketplace, for example.

Still, that such blatant IP theft has made it to the App Store does no-one any favours, not least SolverLabs (amusing strapline: “The world class software labs”—OHO!), who may find themselves minus one iOS dev account once Apple’s team lumbers into view.

Stuart Dredge reports from Nokia World for The Guardian, where Rovio’s marketing chief Peter Vesterbacka was talking Angry Birds:

We’re really excited about making the Angry Birds experience available to the world. We can reach totally new audiences in India, in Africa and all the emerging markets.

Angry Birds: Solves World Poverty edition.

We’re really excited about that. We have 400 million-plus downloads, but hopefully we can add another 400 million together with Nokia in the next few months.

Angry Birds: Making Yet More Money From The Same Old Shit edition.

We haven’t seen ourselves as a games company for a long time…

Angry Birds: Don’t Expect Us To Ever Make Anything Other Than Angry Birds Because We Like Rolling Naked In Money edition.

We’ve now sold over 10 million plush toys, so a million a month, and we also have other products: board games, card games, and we’ve recently launched our first book.

Angry Birds: Not Even Restricted To A Sodding Screen Any More edition.

You can expect to hear more about Rovio books in the not-too-distant future. We’re building the first entertainment brand on the planet with a billion fans. Right now we have 400 million downloads, but we’re only getting started.

Angry Birds: You Will Never Be Rid Of Us edition.

We have 70 million unique users on our HTML5 game online, so we’re deeply versed in HTML5. For us it’s not so much about the technology, it’s about using whatever is there to create the best possible experience for our fans.”

Angry Birds: Just Wait Until We Take Over Facebook, Too edition.

You can expect to see other Angry Birds games, just like Mario. When Mario drives a car, it becomes Mario Kart. When he goes to space, it becomes Super Mario Galaxy… Our birds will do things and go places, and they will go to unexpected places. And some of those places will turn out to be games.

Angry Birds: And You Thought We’d Milked These Characters Enough, But You Really Have No Idea edition.

Still, great to see Rovio being a leading games developer by innovating off of the back of its success, eh? So, let’s all look forward to the exciting, original, inventive Angry Birds Tennis, Angry Birds Kart, Super Angry Birds, Angry Birds 2, Super Angry Birds 2, Dr. Angry Birds, Angry Birds Teach Typing, Angry Birds Teach You How To Cook Pork, Angry Birds Golf, Angry Birds 3, Angry Birds Paint, Angry Birds Are Missing (Only Joking—They Are Fucking Everywhere), Angry Birds All-Stars, Angry Birds Time Machine, Angry Birds Party, Angry Birds Puzzle Collection, Angry Birds Baseball, Angry Birds: GTA, and Angry Birds Classic.