Business Management - Industry Trends

The once-exploding sales growth of eBooks has slowed dramatically, according to research from RR Bowker. “We went from exponential to incremental growth,” said Kelly Gallagher, a Bowker vice president, who also referred to "some level of saturation" in the U.S. market. The breathless predictions of two years ago, which suggested that the growth of eBooks would soon shut down all the book printing presses and brick-and-mortar bookstores, turned out to be way off the mark.

The proportion of book buyers who bought an eBook rose from 17% late last year to only 20% in January, according to Bowker’s research.

Interactive Newsprint is a new research project led by the School of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Central Lancashire (Lancashire, U.K.) and funded by the Digital Economy Programme. The platform is capable of capacitive touch interactions, which means that by touching various parts of the page, readers can activate content ranging from audio reports, web polls or advertising—all contained within the paper itself.
 
But the developments in printed electronics do not stop there. Digital devices and microphones, buttons, sliders, colour changing fibres, LED text displays and mobile communication can all be used in an interactive newspaper.

In a recent article published by Forbes, Mark Potts indicated that there are 10 consumer trends wreaking havoc on brands. Looking at these trends from a print and media convergence point of view, it seems that a printer can take advantage of some of these trends in order to gain business. 

“There is a misplaced view that raw material costs for the graphic art industry are coming down” says Jan Paul van der Velde, senior vice president procurement of Flint Group. “The reality is that, hardly any materials dropped significantly in price.”

The biggest divide going in magazines’ strategy for the iPad and other tablets is whether to bundle app editions with print subscriptions or sell each medium separately. The bundlers include Time Inc., Conde Nast and Meredith, which want to retain more print subscribers, charge more where possible and avoid making anyone feel nickel-and-dimed. The other side includes Hearst and Bonnier, who believe bundling leaves money on the table and makes digital content seem “free.”

“It’s such a hot topic right now,” said Sharon Sennefelder, managing director for print at Horizon Media. “Nobody knows where it’s going to pan out.”

Once the most useful way to photographically catalog a high school experience, yearbooks are becoming less relevant as students opt to upload pictures of themselves and friends throughout the entire school year onto social networking websites—instantly from their smartphones.

The March issue of Harper’s Bazaar arrived at 300,000 subscribers’ homes accompanied by a full-page flier greeting each subscriber by name and urging her to visit specific Neiman Marcus stores within 50 miles. The flier—called an “outsert” in industry jargon—follows a similar effort in Popular Mechanics’ November issue that included an individually personalized outsert promoting HP printers and a 16-page insert pointing readers to HP retailers near their homes.

Harper’s Bazaar and Popular Mechanics are both participating in Project Match, a collaboration between their parent company, Hearst, and HP, which has developed printing technology to enable faster, higher-quality personalized printing.

Many student media publications around the country have stopped printing editions of their publications (whether newspaper, magazine, etc.), citing different reasons. When the LUChameleon was first started last semester, I originally wanted to start it as a print publication, with an online component. Of course, that was in the beginning, when I was still naive about starting a magazine.

iPhone-only application Instagram launched on the App Store in Oct. 2010 and has since become a photo-sharing phenomenon. The application touts a 15-million-member strong community and encourages people to shoot, filter and share their square-format, retro-styled photos on Instagram and across the Web.

Lim Cheng Soon’s story defies convention. It’s a story about the value of curation, the value of community, and, for some, the lasting value of print. Lim is addicted to Hacker News, the popular social news site, and he wanted to solve his own problem of information overload—“to be able to go offline and not to miss out,” he says.

So he decided to start gathering up some of the most popular posts from the site and printing them in a magazine he called Hacker Monthly. Twenty-one issues later, the magazine has about 4,700 subscribers worldwide, Lim said.