We told you that the iPad would not save the press!

Written by Narvic on novövision, July 23rd 2010.
Translated by Lorna Miskelly. See the original article in French
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It’s not the Apple iPad, it’s the iSlate! by Dan Morelle (cc)

I never thought (or wrote for that matter) that the iPad was a bad product or that it wouldn’t sell. It’s just that I don’t personally use it. The iPad is first and foremost a practical multimedia tool -both on and offline- that won’t find its place either in daily commutes (except by train or plane), or at the workplace (except for specific use, say in the education field). We can fairly confidently put forward the idea that it is above all else a consumer object destined for home entertainment use.

And where does the press fit in?

Well, it would be fairly reasonable to think that it is a good tool for looking at all sorts of content: recipes… in the kitchen, games… in the lounge, a good book or film… tucked up in bed, music or news… by the pool… It can also be used, should the occasion arise, for all sorts of services or online purchases… Does that mean that it is really going to radically revolutionize the press? More importantly, will it provide the famous ‘economic model’ that it has been chasing after? That is where, in my opinion, we need to look at ‘what is wrong with this picture?’…

The iPad will not have the ‘disruptive’ effect on use that at one point press editors anticipated and which obviously aroused their enthusiasm. The iPad will most certainly multiply the different places where one will choose to look at content and perhaps at different times of the day compared to before. We can imagine that it will be more practical and comfortable to use an iPad rather than a mobile or smartphone but it has to be said that in all truth there is no reason to believe that it will engender a lasting transformation of usage, especially from an essential financial perspective for the online press, personalised and fragmented information viewing.

The ‘trap’ of specific applications

With the coming of the iPad, press editors fell into a sort of ‘trap’, that of the iPad’s applications. They believed that they had found something that gave them hope that everything was going to be ‘like before’: charging people to view information sold per package and under a recognised label and brand: the online return of the good old newspaper! It was an immense mistake and an obvious one that we could see coming right from the very start.

What’s more, the first user accounts have confirmed this point of view. Benoît Raphaël (April 2010): “The idea that bringing out an e-book was going to necessarily cause a brutal change in use, that’s to say making readers forget the previous fifteen years of unhindered browsing so as to come back to the traditional magazine format of yesteryear was very obviously naïve.”

And yet many press editors believed it!

Initially they didn’t understand that the reason that the applications on the iPhone specifically for their sites were so successful was due to the difficulties (essentially ergonomic) surrounding the iPhone’s navigator (Safari) to be able to surf on the web in the same way as on a ‘normal’ computer. It was really only a success by default or a stopgap measure which remedied the necessity of refitting sites for the small screen and enabling one to download content for later viewing, as a mobile phone is not constantly connected.

Now, on the one hand it was fairly obvious that all of the websites were going to end up offering their own versions adapted to the iPhone screen, putting everyone on the same playing field, as they are on the web.

On the other hand these ergonomic problems are no longer really an issue with the iPad. The size of the screen allows one to look at more or less any website using a simple navigator like Safari. A permanent wi-fi connection at home means that one can surf without having to ‘preload’ content. This basically means that there is no longer any need for specific applications.

The press website applications will have to come up with a pretty breathtaking user experience if they want to make people pay!

The aggregator tsunami

The press editors also didn’t understand that if their specific branded iPhone (then iPad) applications only allowed people to access just their site other applications could then allow people to access those specific sites in a fragmented and non-direct way as indeed many different aggregators on the web permit us to do. I mentioned back in February the LeNewz application, “a GoogleNews for mobiles”, and I imagined that with the arrival of the iPad other more ergonomic, more social, more customised etc. applications wouldn’t take long to appear. And just look, here they are! Pulse News and Flipboard, just to begin with. We’re waiting to see what comes next.

The New York Times made no mistake, in asking for Pulse News to be taken off the shelves of Apple’s applications for the iPad, the iTunes Store. As Christophe Lefevre remarked on TechTrends: “What the New York Times was really unimpressed about was the fact that it is actually much more pleasurable reading its news on the application rather than on their website. The application had become their direct competitor, whilst using their content. Hmmm, that reminds me of the controversy around Google News.”

For press editors, both with mobiles and the web, it is back to square one. That is to say that the conditions are exactly the same; a necessary ’coopetition’ (cooperation + competition) between the ‘old media’ and the new obligatory online intermediaries, aggregators.