For those of you who follow the TomorrowToday blog regularly, you’ll know that one of my interests during 2010 was the shifting landscape of reading. All kinds of reading. Books, Newspapers, Magazines. What we were reading on? How we were going to pay for it? How ‘they’ were going to charge us for it?
I picked up a post on Memeburn this morning called iPad magazines: Not all they’re cut out to be. The thrust of the article centers around the decline in iPad Magazine sales over the last 6 months.
“According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, which collects magazine circulation data from companies willing to furnish numbers, all iPad magazines have seen fall offs in downloads over the past few months. Wired was averaging 31,000 downloads from July through September, had 22,000 and 23,000 respectively in October and November. Other magazines have seen similar declines: Vanity Fair sold 8,700 downloads of its November issue, down from an average of about 10,500 from August through October; GQ sold 11,000 copies, its worst showing yet.”
The author suggests some possible reasons for the decline from a drop in marketing and hype, to the platform, to the price.
I don’t know about you? But I’m watching my reading change. Right in front of my eyes. Quite literally : ) The changes in my world have been influenced largely by the platform I’m using to do the reading and the apps I find to use. Here’s a quick and recent account of events:
The big change to my reading started with my iPhone and Twitter (SimplyTweet). This combination radically altered how I read. Before this duo arrived my world was all magazines, books and newspapers. All of a sudden I was reading 7-10 articles (posts) a day on my iPhone. Magazines and newspapers disappeared almost completely. Books remained.
A Kindle was added to the mix, but it didn’t change my Twitter reading at all. It was a complimentary addition. Of course paper based reading had now almost vanished from my life.
A few months ago I got an iPad. This has not only sent my iPhone packing, but it’s dramatically shifted where I get my reading material from. From getting almost all my reading from Twitter, I now almost exclusively am making use of RSS feeds. This has to do with the app I found, Early Edition. It’s a lot like Flipboard, but I can’t go back to Flipboard for some reason?
So for now Twitter has disappeared as a source of reading. I still engage with Twitter, but it’s become social and about people and less about the links to great reading. I must confess I miss it, and will find a way to integrate it back into my world.
What I do know is that whether people like it or not, the way we read, what we read on, what we’ll pay for it, when we’ll read…. it’s all going to change. I’m prepared to acknowledge I’m a little on edge, an early-ish adopter even, but when I see what’s going on in my reading world, if that’s just a tiny view of the future, we’re all in for quite a ride.
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