App-oplexy: Magazines on the iPad

New technology, same stupid question.

When it comes to iPads and other tablets, the magazine industry seems to be making the same mistake it made with the rise of the Internet and of electronic editions. The erroneous thinking showed up in a recent  promotion from the usually forward-thinking Idealliance for a session that was all about “delivering magazine editions to multiple digital devices in addition to print.”

Yep, magazine-industry executives seem to be looking at the iPad and saying, once again, “Cool technology. How can we put our magazine onto that?”

A more sensible question would be, “How can our brand be translated to this new medium?” or, more crassly, “Can we make money with this thing?”

The result of asking the wrong question is that magazine-industry apps are, for the most part, boring.

“Having spent much of the past week downloading (or sometimes struggling to download) book and magazine apps in the search for design gems, I've come to the glum conclusion that most were designed with little or no imagination,” Alice Rawsthorn of The New York Times wrote yesterday. “All the designers seem to have done is to have shunted the original printed products on to the screen.”

But there are at least two signs of hope that the industry can learn to translate its brands onto tablets: Cosmopolitan mined its extensive investigative reporting on the Kama Sutra to create its Sex Position of the Day app, and Guitar World showed how to do a logical brand extension with its new (and well received) Lick of the Day app.

(Mr. Tree wants to know why none of the women he dates are Cosmo readers. Answer: He needs to spend less time hanging around in bookstores and more time hanging around on street corners.)

For those of you wondering about the difference between the Cosmo and Guitar World apps, only the latter will show you how to use an instant flanger.

Well, come to think of it, maybe those naughty Cosmo editors have found a creative use for instant flangers as well.

Other articles about the magazine industry:

• Tina Brown Follows Husband's Footsteps -- Sort Of makes note of a magazine without a Web site and a Web site without a magazine.
• 9 Differences Between a School System and a Publishing Company: Lessons for Cathie Black explores the distinction between principals and principles. 
• The Yellowing of National Geographic: Will Today's Copies Age Faster Than That Stack in Your Gramma's Attic? has a really long headline.

High Costs and Lack of Training Are Barriers To Intelligent Mail

High costs that outweigh any postage discounts and poorly trained Postal Service employees are keeping most business mailers from using Full Service Intelligent Mail barcodes, an extensive study concludes.

Of the 290 business mailers surveyed by USPS’s Office of Inspector General, 58% said they did not use Full Service IMbs because of high start-up costs and software requirements. Only 23% of the surveyed mailers said they were using Full Service.

“The man hours that go into making a mailing Full Service compatible are not worth the postage discount,” said one large mail owner (more than 1 million pieces annually). Another estimated it would have to spend more than $100,000 on new print heads and software upgrades to be able to create Full Service mailings.

The OIG report, released a few days ago, recommended that the Postal Service consider new Full Service incentives “to offset program start-up costs.”

But money is not the only issue, and perhaps not even the biggest one, the report indicated. Mailers will find their mailing vendors – “mail service providers” in postalspeak – reluctant to handle full-service mailings because the Postal Service’s employees and information systems are so poorly prepared to handle them.

The OIG recommended that USPS provide more training to Business Mail Entry (BMEU) clerks and PostalOne! help desk employees. Management largely shrugged off that recommendation, but the OIG considers the issue so significant that it won’t consider the matter closed until it receives written confirmation that corrective action has been taken.

Full Service Intelligent Mail barcodes uniquely identify each mailpiece. IM barcodes are part of the Postal Service’s plan to track and manage mail volumes in an automated way, but Dead Tree Edition has nicknamed them “FUBAR codes” because of the program’s many problems.

The OIG report includes some instructive comments from mail service providers, including these:

• “USPS employees know little or nothing about this service and this is frustrating mailers with the IMB Full Service.”
• “Provide better BMEU training during initial mailings so the clerks and their managers know & understand the process (better than I do - I shouldn't be teaching them).”
• “The PostalOne! help desk most of the time does not have a clue they don’t respond to e-mails all the time and the wait time on the phone is too long.”
• “To make matters worse, even the USPS personnel (in Memphis) are confused as I've had to correct and educate them.”

Related articles:

• For Intelligent Mail, Occasional Failure Is An Option describes reliability problems with the web-based PostalOne! information system.
• Postal Service Chooses "Un-Intelligent" Mail points out that a Postal Service catalog doesn’t use IMbs.
• Full-Service Intelligent Mail? Forget About It, Postal Expert Says focuses on the 10 reasons not to use Full Service IMbs.
• Intelligent Snail: USPS Finally Addressing Crossed-Out Barcodes, which has some interesting comments from postal employees, reports on a failure to retrain letter carriers regarding IMbs.

Follow The Grayscale-Brick Road: Why Color E-Ink Doesn’t Rival Four-Color Printing

On the way to creating its new color product that is supposed to make e-readers “Just Like Paper, Only Better,” E Ink forgot a few basic things. Like elementary school physics. And the color yellow.

As a result, the new Triton Imaging Film has a limited range of colors and a washed-out look that falls far short of four-color printing.

“The color is extremely desaturated even in their carefully presented marketing materials,” writes printing and color expert Gordon Pritchard. “The display's lack of color saturation may actually reveal the cause of the problem.” A friend of Dead Tree Edition who saw a prototype device confirms that the color is underwhelming.

Because they use reflected light (just like paper) rather than emitted light (like computer screens), E Ink’s products seem to be easy on the eyes and on battery life. That has made them a component of such popular products as the Kindle DX and the Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Triton-based readers will shrink “the digital divide between paper and electronic displays,” E Ink promises, thereby “enhancing the visual experience for ePublishing markets such as eBooks, eNewspapers, eMagazines, and eTextbooks."

Here’s the design flaw: Triton uses the red-green-blue (RGB) color scheme that works for computer screens and other emitted-light devices but is ill suited to a reflected-light device.

If you remember your elementary school physics, red light, green light, and blue light can be combined to create just about any color. That works fine if you control the light sources.

But if you use reflected light, you need to filter those primary colors to create the desired hues. That’s why four-color printing relies on cyan (which filters out red light but allows green and blue to be reflected back to the eye), magenta (which blocks out green), and yellow (which filters out blue) – plus black.

“There is no RGB combination of ink hues that will deliver a yellow hue – and yellow is noticeably absent from the images so far shown for this display technology,” Pritchard adds.

If Triton mimicked the CMY (cyan-magenta-yellow) color scheme used by printers, he adds, it would have achieved similar results “in terms of color gamut and saturation. The color intensity would change according to the ambient light and be dependent on the ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ of the underlying black and white screen pigments.”

USPS Speeds Up FSS Start-Ups

After starting up just seven Flats Sequencing System machines in the past six months, the U.S. Postal Service says it will have another 10 handling live mail by the end of this month.

USPS has greatly accelerated the pace of machine installations now that it has nailed down where the 100 machines in FSS Phase I will go and what ZIP codes they will handle. Besides the 18 that were already processing mail and the 10 being added this month, another 46 of the football field-sized monsters have been installed, according to a revised deployment schedule USPS released recently.

The Postal Service says it is still on pace to have all 100 machines up and running by June of next year. The latest plan is for those machines to sort catalogs, magazines, and other flat mail for 2,328 ZIP codes in 47 locations.

As noted in Is The FSS A Boondoggle?, the jury is still out on whether the $1.4 billion Phase I investment will be worthwhile and whether FSS will truly revolutionize the handling of flats mail. But the machines do seem to be reducing letter carriers’ in-office time, resulting in fewer carriers needed for areas served by FSS. And some of the machines have had idle days for lack of flat mail to process.

One aspect of FSS not likely to succeed is a recently implemented program that lets mailers package flat mail the way they will eventually be required to do for FSS zones. Following the optional preparation standards would result in more copies per bundle and in pallets configured optimally for the FSS machines, enabling USPS to test its theories about the best way to create bundles and pallets of mail for the machines.

But using the optional standards means loss of carrier-route discounts, which would be a significant penalty for most mailers. So it’s hard to see why they would go through the hassle and cost to participate in the experiment.

Related articles:

• FSS Throughputs 9% Below Plan, USPS Official Says  
• The Unofficial Guide to Flats Sequencing
• FSS Machines Shuffled Again -- But Do They Work?