As you’ve no doubt heard from a slew of other, far more reputable news sources, Apple yesterday announced the release of the iPad; a portable, full colour tablet device which on the face of it, looks like it’s going to shake up not just the computing industry but TV, gaming and publishing as well.

As the New York Observer reported late last year, Time Inc., Conde Nast and Hearst have all signed a deal to sell digital mags in a kind of iTunes for magazines and books and which Apple revealed yesterday will be called, you guessed it, iBooks.

Are we worried? Actually, not a bit.

We’re obliged, of course, to carry the Time and Newsweeks of this world but they are by no means our bread and butter. A vast and overwhelming proportion of our sales are for small-run, collectible, niche titles like Sneaker Freaker, Lula, Purple Fashion, Self Service and Dumbo feather… that is, beautiful tactile printed objects.

Which is to say that most of the magazines we sell are not than the kind of throwaway newsprint titles that this device may end up replacing.

More than anyone, we’re aware of how wasteful the magazine industry is; every week we send back hundreds of unsold magazines to our distributors where they’ll be pulped. This kind of slash and burn approach is at best unsustainable and at worst, completely wasteful and absurd in the year 2010. (I mean, this is meant to be ‘the future’, right? If we’d had our way, the iPad would have surfaced closer to 2001 along with jetpacks, ray-guns and teleportation devices.)

We hope that the arrival of a portable reading device such as the iPad will stamp out a huge proportion of the unnecessary waste created by the publishing industry, but by no means we do we see it spelling the end of the magazine format as we know it. 

Just as sales of vinyl LPs continue to steadily rise in the face of downloads and (dwindling) CD sales, we see a promising future for niche printed media and we look forward to being a part of that for years to come.

Fittingly,  London based Newspaper Club goes into public beta today. These guys are set to launch on-demand newspaper printing for individuals and groups wanting to print as few as five newsprint papers or as many as five thousand for a comparable per unit price.

How cool is this? Video screens embedded into magazines. The possibilities are endless. Or are they?

We are already inundated with moving advertising. Everywhere we look. Do we need more of it? And are magazines the ideal format for this?

Many pundits are forecasting the end of print. We obviously think this is a croc of shit. While magazines will undergo a mass rationalization and the crud will sink, the really good, targeted and highly visual mags will continue to flourish. Innovation is a great thing but this particular advance might be ill thought out. Definitely for Australia and New Zealand anyway.

In the US, mags run mainly off a subscription model. The mainstream rags are almost given away for free when you subscribe, and circulation numbers are then used to drive print advertising revenues. Newsstand sales over there are less important in the context of overall of circulation than what they are in this part of the world.

Here, wastage rates run at around 50%. Can you imagine the electronic wastage that will be caused by pulping 50% of the mags you see on the average newsstand if this technology were to be more broadly applied?

Cool innovation, especially when it comes to magazines. But we think that this one will need to be sparingly used.

Borders UK is about to venture into the world of digital magazines.

http://www.nma.co.uk/borders-builds-confidence-in-digital-editions/3001220.article

People often ask us our opinion of e-zines. They tend to polarise people. The one camp thinks that they spell the inevitable death of magazines as we know them, while the ardent print supporters write them off as irrelevant. Most think that we would fall into the second camp, but we don’t.

Online magazines definitely have their place, and will only grow in popularity. However, we see them as a completely different product. Magazines are about so much more than just information. The ones that are mere information peddlers will either have to adapt, or they will die. These are the titles that are truly at risk from online media.

The really great magazines build “engagement”. There you go, our favourite word pops up again. And this engagement is much more than in relation to the words and images on their pages. These magazines stand for something, evoke conversations, communities of interest. For these magazines, online content is one arrow in their quiver.

So am I alarmed that you can subscribe to digital content from many of our favourite magazines? No – of course not. We knew this well before starting up the business. But to say that online magazines won’t spell the end for many mediocre publications is to bury our head in the sand.

Good luck to Borders UK with this initiative. It looks like for once we share a philosophical position – online and print can be complimentary. The real challenge will be in the execution. If they were to throw lots of money at us, I bet we could help them nail it. Looks like we’ll just have to get there on our own. One day.