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Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps is a great piece by Jason Pontin of Technology Review, explaining why apps haven’t proven to be the savior of publishing. The lack of linking and creation of “small, stifling gardens” is key, as are the economics of a business model that actually forced publishers to pay Apple for the privilege of selling single issues of magazines. Then there were the immense technical challenges, none of which mean a fig to the reader but which cause expensive headaches for the publisher. In short, the overarching question is simple but profound: what do users want or expect from their digital reading experience, and how do publishers provide that without bankrupting themselves? Clearly, providing a walled garden experience doesn’t cut it, and Pontin is searingly candid in his assessment of Technology Review’s own rather desultory experiments:

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.

That last phrase holds the key. As long as publishers attempt to shoehorn the old into the new, it proves they still haven’t understood the shifts to their business. 

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