MoneyWatch Tech

Publishers Screw Themselves Over Strategy and Consumer Navigation

By Erik Sherman

Updated on: November 9, 2010 / 3:53 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Color finally comes to E Ink screens, the type of easy reading, lower power displays you'll find on a Kindle. And although you won't find them in the near future on many devices (colors are muted and the screens can't handle full-motion video), you can bet that publishers are tripping over themselves to monitor each development. That's because the entire industry seems convinced that electronic publication -- whether on an e-reader, tablet, or smartphone -- is its future. As the example my BNET colleague Marion Maneker offers, it will be hard to stop ebooks now that they are a billion dollar business.

However, if anyone can trip publishing hopes, it is the publishers themselves. And they're doing almost everything they can to do so, including putting hurdles in the way of readers, all in the name of design and strategies intended to attract those same people.

It starts with the bizarre assumptions that the industry will make about its customers. For example, Beth Snyder Bulik in Advertising Age had the insight that too many executives buy into popular myths that may have no basis in reality. She runs through a list (with data to disprove each) that sets movers and shakers down the wrong path. Here are some that seem particularly applicable:

Less than 3 percent of the population of the US population actually owns an iPad. (And she used overall sales numbers, which includes international, so the percentage is even smaller.)
Although much of the country has Facebook accounts, it's only about half of the total population. And only half of the Facebook users log in on a given day.
Most people do not make six-figure incomes, and of the ones that do in large urban areas, the cost of living is much higher than elsewhere, so there is less disposable income than many executives-who-would-be-salespeople like to think.
Of all the people who are supposedly on Twitter, 40 percent have never sent a single tweet and 80 percent have sent fewer than 10.
People with money actually do shop at Walmart. (Given where the economy has been, you might ask how many could afford not to.)

Once you realize that basic assumptions are off, you might not be surprised to hear that more specific suppositions about high tech media consumers are equally flawed. CondÃ© Nast did an extensive study and had to conclude that iPad and iPhone app users were far different from the technical gotta-haves they expected, as paidContent.org notes:

The company gleaned a number of things from 100 hours of one-on-one interviews and more than 5,000 in-app surveys it conducted over the past few weeks. Among the findings, participants weren't familiar with the kind of navigation that was used in iPhone magazine apps and that interactive ads often need to come with directions, as well. But the big news is iPad and iPhone readers seem to spend more time with the digital replicas in comparison to the print versions.

And the other big point was that people generally used iPads at home and not as mobile devices. Multiple important observations come out of this single study. One of the most astounding is that people have to learn how to use electronic publications and, given the lack of standard approaches to navigation, must relearn every time they want to read a different title.

Think about that for a second. Today, you could open virtually any book and magazine in any language and probably be able to navigate through. At worst, you'd realize that something was in Hebrew and opened from left to right as people read right to left, so you'd flip the publication over and orient yourself. Go anywhere in the world and you're likely to be able to use a faucet.

But publishers have turned the common experience of reading something into a case of having to figure out how to apply your basic skills. No wonder they spend more time with the publications. Part of that is probably devoted to figuring out how to use them. Granted, at least CondÃ© Nast seems to have learned a few things. However, even consumers who latch onto a given device can't necessarily count on a uniform approach to publication navigation. That leaves the entire industry creating their own walled gardens, with consumers left to fend for themselves. And you thought modern life provided enough reasons for people to read less. But then, why be surprised? It looks as though the publishers had their eyes closed from the start.

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Image: Flickr user Sklathill, CC 2.0.