WIRED:Caution should be the watchword when trying to create profitable content for a new device
LIKE ANY other geek with a pulse, I was glued last week to watching the first, excited demonstrations of software available for the Apple iPad. Drooling at the rather beautiful animated and interactive iPad adaptation of Theodore Gray's Elementscoffee-table book, however, I suddenly flashed back to a previous age of exciting new computing media. I thought of the CD-rom age of the 1990s, of the money thrown into "interactive media" sinkholes by publishers and the market carnage that followed, and wondered if it was all about to begin again.
I fear the iPad will lure traditional publishing houses, just as the CD-rom did 20 years ago, and they will make the same mistakes: mistakes they can now ill-afford.
CD-roms were the last-but-one great hope for publishing houses at the tail-end of the 20th century struggling to understand what they might be doing in the 21st. Companies from Dorling-Kindersley to News Corp threw millions into developing “electronic books”: software burned onto the first CD discs and designed to run on Apple or PC hardware.
These companies got back very little return on their investment. Their early projects boiled down to fancy-schmancy but clunky David Bowie vanity projects, incredibly complex and labour-intensive animated reworkings of their existing bestsellers. Each one won more awards than it sold copies, and eventually those “interactive divisions” were rolled into the “online media” departments, where their designers would struggle to take their 700MB visions and use them within the drastic limits of the first web pages.
In the inevitable postmortem, people muttered about how it was the internet that killed the CD-rom but I think that, as ever, the real murderer was economics. A “professional” CD-rom was just too expensive to produce, relative to the format it was generally parasitical upon. I would marvel at the incredible lopsided nature of CD-roms given free in magazines. The CD-rom could hold close to a gigabyte of data, including programs, movies and graphics – all of which had to be commissioned, collated, edited, checked for viruses, cleared for copyright, mastered and burned. If done well, a front-mounted CD-rom was a far more expensive venture than actually putting out a magazine – and yet they usually paid a single person to do it all, didn’t charge for the CD, and probably got little advertising revenue from it.
Most started attempting to flash up their CD products with incredibly fancy interactive environments that would quickly consume their annual budget. The ones that survived would ultimately collapse into padding the CD-rom out with cheap, throwaway software. Professional product got thrown out of the window in an attempt to feed the ever-hungry maw of interactive content.
This, to me, is the flipside of the "digital technology makes everything cheaper" argument. It makes a lot of work cheaper, but it can also make professional-quality media fantastically more expensive than its analogue equivalents. Elementswill do very well, because it benefits from that "fresh platform" smell the iPad exudes. But can you re-gear a newspaper or a publishing house to produce the level of interactive complexity that even the simplest app is going to demand, when it is competing with games and films?
Of course, this time around, it may be very different. The audience is far, far bigger. Our price-points for digital media are all over the shop. We'll pay more for a ringtone than a full MP3. We pay $10 for a stream of alphanumeric characters on our Amazon Kindle if it's written by Stephen King, and a dollar for a pocket application that plays farts. Who knows what we might pay for an iPad version of Timemagazine? But if you believe, as Timedoes, that iPad owners are going to pay $5 every week for an exciting new "interactive" Timeapplication, I think you're running against the clock. No matter how you innovate, other applications are going to make yours look ridiculously clumsy in a matter of months. In a year people will be amazed anyone paid $14 for something as old-fashioned as Elements.
I know old media companies will seize on the iPad, with its payment system and closed environment, as a life raft in this uncertain age. And publishing companies will be tempted to go for the all-singing, all-dancing iPad application. But they risk doing what many companies did in the CD-rom era: spending money on a prestige project, when what they need is an incoming revenue stream.
The goldrush economics of the iPad will hide this for a little while, because everything will be briefly profitable. But to be sustainable in the digital world, you need the same conditions as the real world. You can’t just make some single wonderful shiny demo product. You need to keep producing them: you need some way of economising that process. And you need to stop others from making their shiny thing cheaper than, yet interchangeable with, yours.
Despite what Steve Jobs says, sometimes everything isn’t magically, revolutionarily, different, no matter how shiny the product.
