Auf den ersten Blick sind die Fronten zwischen Verlagen (My point is that I don’t believe people actually give a flying frog about file size—they care about value.
) und Leserinnen (Use plain text for layout. HTML would be great.
) immer noch so verhärtet wie vor zwei Jahren: Die Verlage erstellen Druckfassungen ihrer Magazine und bieten sie als Bildersammlung zum Download an – Why would people pay for something that looks like a web site?
– und die Leserinnen würden Drucklayouts gern gegen kleinere Downloads und flexiblere Handhabung eintauschen.
Allerdings beginnen einige Verlage auszuscheren:
We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we're redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we'll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we'll kill our apps, too.
Wow. Vielleicht schafft die Branche doch noch die Wende, bevor sich das Problem von selbst erledigt.