Magazines and newspapers are slowly dying. Sure, traditional print is seeing drops in sales all across the board, and there is a recession going on, but magazines and newspapers have been hit the worst. In a scramble to inject new life into this once thriving market, we’ve heard lots of different proposals from lots of different magazine companies. The least interesting is the tablet concocted by Sports Illustrated (basically a netbook that has all the functionality of a web page), but the most interesting has to go to Hearst’s new Skiff project.
The Skiff project is the publishing giant’s new platform for reading electronic magazines and newspapers. There will be an e-reader available (using e-paper from the reports, although we’re not sure what brand, what company, whether it will use color or black and white), one that will be similar to the Kindle DX in size, so it better replicates the layout/design of a magazine/newspaper. It will be interesting to see if the device will come with a year’s subscription to any magazine/newspaper out of the box (a selling point in the overly saturated, high priced e-reader market), and if it will automatically renew subscriptions for users of the device.
Like the Kindle and the Nook, the Skiff will also be multi-platform, allowing users to read Skiffy stuff on their cellphones, i-Pods, computers, netbooks, laptops, etc. While this isn’t ground breaking itself, it seems that having a transportable platform is one way for publishers to skirt one of the more annoying aspects of DRM (that, for some reason they still insist on using, even after free, open publishing platforms like ePub have become available), allowing them to take their books/magazines/newspapers to different devices without getting locked out.
Skiff takes this one step further, and is actually working with the semiconductor company Marvell for making a Skiff on a chip, that takes the platform and puts it directly on a chip, on that can be placed in almost any portable device. This would make it easy for companies like Barnes and Noble and Amazon to quickly add Skiff support to their own e-readers without much extra work.
Like the Nook and the Kindle, the proprietary Skiff e-reader will be able to download from a wireless connection to the internet. This seems to be a de-facto standard these days for e-readers, and is good for both publishers and readers. Readers can buy a book in seconds, and the publishing house gets tons of extra sales through impulse buying. Amazon has even come out and said that Kindle users buy more books than any other customer. This will be a huge book to the Skiff. Here’s hoping they let users buy single issues of a magazine, and not require them to get yearly subscriptions. It would be worth while to allow users to purchase single articles. Wouldn’t that be cool? I just want such and such a piece, from page 4 of Scientific American - all you pay is 50 cents and you get it in seconds.
They say they’ve got a lot of publishers backing this service, but haven’t listed anyone specific just yet. This will prove to be the sink or swim of the Skiff, if they can get support from a number of large publishers for the magazine/newspaper industry. If they can do this, they can become the standard of the industry.
It will be interesting to see how it pans out. Already the Kindle and the Nook offer magazine and newspaper subscriptions at a pretty decent cost. Will it be worth it to get yet another device just for reading magazines and newspapers? What do our readers think? Is the Skiff something revolutionary, or is it a flash in the pan? Do we really need yet another single function device just for magazines?
e-reader, hearst, magazine, newspaper, skiff
[...] the Kindle DX, giving them newspaper or magazine size layouts on an e-paper screen. Hearst’s e-reader for it’s Skiff platform is rumored to be about the size of a magazine, as is Plastic Logic’s up and coming e-reader [...]