With Apple’s ‘magical’ iPad launching this Saturday in the US, publishers are gearing up with everything from Flash-free HTML5 video to interactive magazines and ebooks-as-apps.
Determined to hitch a ride on the ‘iPad wave’, publishers are trying to cover all bases when it comes to creating content for Apple’s touchscreen tablet.
Rupert Murdoch is said to be a fan of the platform – indeed, Murdoch himself said his company had its own iPad for pre-launch development, with the device kept “under padlock and key… (and) the key is turned by Apple every night” – and
The Wall Street Journal has announced an iPad subscription package costing US$18 (A$20) per month, or US$4.15 per week.
This represents a hefty premium over the cost of the newspaper’s paywall-protected Web site (US$2 per week) and even the print+paywall combo deal of US$3.50 per week.
The New York Times,
Time magazine and CBS.com (the Web site of US television network CBS) are all setting up Flash-free versions of their sites. These detect visitors using an iPad – and potentially the iPhone, as both run a the same Webkit-based ‘mobile Safari’ browser – and supply video clips in the iPad-friendly HTML5 format rather than Flash.
Penguin Books demonstrated a series of possible iPad books in London earlier this month, but suggests that some titles would end up as stand-alone apps rather than books compiled into the ePub format supported by the iPad and most other ebook readers.
“The ePub format is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about” said CEO John Makinson. “We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do.… so for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications rather than in e-books. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs.”
The New York Times has also reported on the efforts of VIVmag, “an all-digital lifestyle magazine” which plans to introduce a customised iPad version laden with video clips, interactive editorial and advertising which goes beyond the relatively static flipping of pages. Demonstrations of VIVmag’s iPad edition can be viewed at
http://vimeo.com/user1257445.