Business Management - Industry Trends

David Carey is the eternal optimist. The president of Hearst Magazines has his fingers on the pulse of the magazine industry. His prescription for an industry’s cure was outlined in his New Year’s letter to Hearst employees in which he stressed the need and importance of both the ink on paper and the pixels on the screen new magazine media business model.

I had the opportunity to visit with Mr. Carey last week. David was generous enough to share with me on tape some of his ideas and practices regarding the magazine industry now and in the future...

Apple’s one-hour event Thursday seemed fairly simple. But the ramifications of what Apple announced may go a lot further than simply changing the way we educate children. One of the biggest misconceptions I run into is the assumption that developing iOS apps is easy. It’s not.

Roman Hohol says tablets and other digital devices will depress the demand for printed media even faster than most forecasts predict. But the director-marketing practice for Forest Industry Consulting also sees signs that the tablet revolution will benefit many publishers.

Of the 5,000 magazine and newspaper iPad apps we’ve evaluated for McPheters & Co.’s iMonitor service since April 2010, far too many simply do not work well. In the summer of 2010, about 45 percent of the apps we evaluated revealed significant malfunctions. That proportion is falling, but not quickly enough: Our analysis shows that about a third of all apps we have evaluated still have at least one serious shortcoming.

According to InfoTrends, the global market for wide-format UV-curable inkjet printers and supplies is expected to grow from $1.42 billion in 2010 to $3.04 billion in 2015 for a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4 percent.

When Apple launched the tablet, single copies were the only way most magazines were available, and the consumer backlash was brutal. But now...single issues have turned out to be a good way of selling back copies of magazines, which has been cumbersome to do in print.

“The Serpent’s Shadow,” the final book in “The Kane Chronicles” series by best-selling author Rick Riordan, will be released on May 1, 2012, with a two-million-copy first printing. It will simultaneously release in hardcover and as an eBook from Disney Publishing’s Disney-Hyperion imprint.

With newsstand sales down almost across the board, the past few years have been, well, bumpy for the magazine industry. With the dawning of 2012, the print industry is pulling out all the stops to refresh, innovate and improve their product.

Now that just about everyone else is done publishing their annual feel-good “Best Of” lists, it’s time for Dead Tree Edition to remind us what a crappy year we just stumbled through. Here’s a look back at some of the media world’s unsung losers and overlooked failures of 2011:

What do the book makers believe about the future of reading? I had the pleasure of speaking with the charismatic President and CEO of Ingram Content Group, David “Skip” Prichard. How do you see the growth prospects for books in all forms over the next five to 10 years?