I ran across an interesting pair of articles concerning academic journal indexes—a complaint about the journals' expense and inaccessibility by Laura McKenna in The Atlantic, and a rebuttal pointing out a number of errors and misconceptions in McKenna’s article by Nancy Sims of the University of Minnesota Libraries on her blog. At the heart of McKenna’s complaint is the often outlandish pricing for individual articles found on some of these journals, such as JSTOR. She brings up the example of a charge of $38 for a 12-page article. McKenna posts an explanation for this state of affairs that involves...

On paidContent, Gregory Galant suggests a way that the magazine industry could help itself stay afloat that does not involve making an iPad app. He points out that in its focus on digital, the industry seems to be ignoring certain other aspects of the overall magazine customer service experience—most notably the subscription process. Galant reports that his own experience resubscribing to a magazine involved being billed on an actual physical invoice that came in the mail. “In Japan you can buy a coke from a vending machine with your phone,” Galant points out. “The magazine industry’s still mailing invoices?”...

PaidContent has a brief report on IDG Connect statistics suggesting that iPad owners are buying less physical media. The survey shows that 72% of worldwide professionals polled are buying fewer newspapers, 70% are buying fewer books, and 49% are buying fewer DVDs since owning an iPad. The biggest areas of decline for newspapers are Asia, with 90% of polled buying fewer, and the Middle East, with 80% buying fewer. This represents a bit of a double-whammy for ad-funded media like newspapers and magazines—not only are they getting fewer sales, but they’re also losing the print ad views of the...

Remember when Readability went freemium, adding a subscription fee from which it could pay magazines whose content got ad-stripped? (This caused it to run afoul of Apple’s in-app payments policy, though it resubmitted and got that straightened out.) It turned out that Readability’s ambitions did not match up to readers’ expectations, with only a few thousand people willing to kick in $5 per month for the service, so in November the company slid back toward free by adding some premium features back to free accounts. Now it turns out apparently even that was not worthwhile, and the...

This past week, the Kindle iOS app received an update. We did mention it when it happened, but I think a couple of the features in that update are important enough to go into in detail. First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari...

A recent survey by the Association of Magazine Publishers has turned up some interesting results. It surveyed 1,009 adult readers of e-magazines on their use habits and features they would like to see. Of those surveyed, 90% said they read as much or more magazine content as before they had a tablet. 76% of them said they preferred newsstand-style subscription centers, like Zinio or Apple’s Newsstand, and 55% said they like to be able to read back issues. But the intriguing part has to do with in-app purchase features. 70% of those surveyed wanted to be able...

A number of stories on the page-reformatting/save-for-later-reading app front broke today. First of all, Arc90’s Readability, which earlier this year implemented a subscription model with Read It Later-like article-saving functionality for those who paid for it (and axed its old bookmarklet which worked better), has announced it is moving a few steps back toward a freer model with a free iOS app. It turns out that only 2,000 to 10,000 people so far have thought the ability to save articles for later in Readability was worth paying $5 a month for (imagine that!), and Readability’s founders hope that...

Our sister blog Gadgetell has a brief piece on the new version of the Nook for Android app, which notably adds the Nook Newsstand and personalized recommendations to the app for any Android device running version 2.1 or later—including smartphones. And speaking of Newsstand apps, ReadWriteWeb looks at the Kindle Fire Newsstand’s app as one of Amazon’s secret weapons in the war against the iPad. Offering over 400 full-color publications,  and including a free three-month trial of various Condé Nast magazines for those who subscribe before March 1, 2012, the app will compete with Apple’s own Newsstand. The Apple...

Marco Ament, the developer of Instapaper, discusses a critical problem with iOS 5 that will affect any application that stores its own content—including e-book readers. It has to do with iOS 5’s iCloud backup system. Apple wants to reduce the amount of data that has to go out over wifi, and is asking developers not to store such data in Documents folders within the app itself that would get automatically backed up. Instead: Data that can be downloaded again or regenerated should be stored in the <Application_Home>/Library/Caches directory. Examples of files you should put in the...

CNet has an interesting, fairly long interview with Josh Quittner, who was formerly the director of Time Inc.’s digital magazine strategy as well as Time.com’s editorial chief before quitting to take a job as editorial director for Flipboard. Quittner is a veteran tech journalist and editor, which makes it all the more fascinating he would take a position at such a young startup. Quittner explains that he was drawn to Flipboard by the changes that are taking place in the context of magazines. Flipboard represents a chance to break out of the traditional one-size-fits-all template magazines have used...

I actually saw this on the nightly news last night when visiting my parents: a video making the rounds on YouTube featuring a 1-year-old who plays with an iPad, then gets confused and disappointed when paper magazines don’t respond the same way to being tapped or slid on. “For my 1-year-old daughter, a magazine is an iPad that does not work,” says the video’s poster. “It will remain so for her whole life. Steve Jobs has coded a part of her OS.” On the other hand, he could be reading too much into it. One of the...

As Hurricane Irene approaches the upper east coast, property damage is of course a key concern—but Hurricane Irene is also, at least temporarily, knocking down some virtual walls—paywalls. Laura Hazard Owen reports on PaidContent that the New York Times and Newsday.com are both making hurricane coverage available to all readers for free. E-magazine service Zinio is also offering free issues of several electronic magazines to travelers stranded by the hurricane. Of course, the usefulness of these free services depends on people being able to keep their connectivity during the storm. USA Today has a guide suggesting ways for...