The magazine "Fantasy & Science Fiction," which has been around for over 60 years, is trying out a new way to sell copies: it's going to start giving away the nonfiction sections, plus one fiction story, from each issue for free through the Kindle Store, while offering a paid subscription (at $1/month) for the full issue. In some ways, this is sort of like using the Kindle Store as an email list marketing tool—get users to sign up for the free stuff, then remind them regularly that there's new content for sale. But another analogue may be the freemium...

Mashable's Lauren Indvik recently shadowed the men and women behind Sports Illustrated and published a case study of their workflow. There are some interesting lessons here for other publishers who are developing a digital strategy. Indvik writes: ...web and print are divided mainly by article length: the web is for shorter, newsier hits and print is a repository for long-form journalism. Quality is consistent largely because most of Sports Illustrated‘s staff touch every extension of the brand. Nearly all the writers (95%) produce content for both the web and print, filing short news pieces for the web while building out longer,...

The Nieman Journalism Lab is carrying an interview with Scott Dadich, vice president of digital magazine development for Condé Nast. Dadich discusses the importance of having magazines on the iPad, the controversy over whether to work directly with Apple or try to circumvent the app store, and how faithful an e-magazine adaptation should be to the print version. Where some publishers balk at the 30% bite Apple takes out of their revenue, or Apple’s reluctance to share the sort of subscriber information they need to sell advertising, Dadich thinks that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. He feels that media...

One of the biggest events in computer gaming last month was the long anticipated launch of Valve’s puzzle game Portal 2. After several months of promotion, including an alternate reality game, Valve's Portal sequel was exactly what's a lot of gamers had been waiting for. And after they finished beating the game—which, like its predecessor, did not take very long—some of them might have been curious exactly how the game came about. Enter game journalist Geoff Keighley. Keighley had written a series of articles called "Final Hours” about the production of various other computer games in the ‘90s and...

The New York Times is carrying an interesting piece on the success the Nook Color has found among the female magazine-reading demographic. Being smaller and simpler than the iPad, the Nook Color seems to come across as less of a “toy for boys” and something women can be more comfortable with. Certainly that’s one of the ways Barnes & Noble is marketing it. And what few sales figures are available seem to bear out the success of this approach. Magazine top sellers include US Weekly, Shape, Women’s Health and Every Day with Rachael Ray. Men’s...

In January, I mentioned that Playboy Magazine was coming out with an uncensored web application for the iPad. Today it launched, bypassing Apple’s app store (and associated censorship) by creating a magazine application that can be loaded onto the device by visiting an iPad-optimized webpage, i.playboy.com. (Do I really need to tell you it’s not a good idea to go there from work?) Playboy offers subscription rates of $8 for one month, $60 for one year, or $100 for two years, and proudly proclaims this will provide access to “Every issue of Playboy ever made on your iPad”. Thus,...

Reuters reports on a company called Yudu that will supposedly allow magazine publishers to evade the 30% commission on iPhone and iPad media, by allowing publishers to sell issues direct from their websites that can then be downloaded directly onto the device. Yudu claims that Apple has approved its service as complying with app store terms and conditions. I find myself a little skeptical, however. First off, I don’t think Apple is going to go through all the hoopla of imposing a “thou shalt sell through in-app purchase” rule not to enforce it. Second, Apple has not proven itself...

Last month, we mentioned Condé Nast’s plans to convert every one of its magazines to digital tablet format by the end of 2011. However, it seems Condé Nast has changed its mind, at least in part. A report in Ad Age suggests that the publishing company is planning to scale back its efforts and concentrate on magazines that are most likely to find audiences first. "It's a shift," one Conde publisher said. "The official stance was we're going to get all our magazines on the iPad because this is going to be such an important stream....

Gizmodo points out a drawback of subscribing to magazines through the Kindle: when you cancel your subscription, you lose not only future issues of the magazine, but the previous issues you already paid for as well. Furthermore, you can’t transfer old issues to a new device if you’re switching over. This seems to be a rather serious flaw in the subscription method. It would be one thing if a subscription essentially gave you access to all issues, past and present, so that if you were to resubscribe you’d be able to read everything once more. That seems like a more logical...

On Maximum PC, author David Gerrold slots the e-book into place as the latest member of a distinguished lineage of disruptive media that build on what came before them. Movies built on novels and Broadway plays, radio built on records and vaudeville, television built on radio, and so on. He points out that the imperative for old media when faced with the new has always been “adapt or die”—and litigating has historically been a poor method of adapting. (He brings up the example of Lotus 1-2-3, which essentially sued itself out of existence.) He brings up the e-book reader,...

Remember when the New York Times got upset about RSS reader Pulse making use of its feed? And Gizmodo wondered whether Flipboard was legal for the use it made of publishers’ content? The controversy is popping up again with iPad news app Zite. Zite is a remarkable iPad application and I’ve been meaning to review it for a while now. Essentially, it’s a sort of “Pandora for news”—it looks at your social network feeds and, rather than aggregating news posts from those feeds like Flipboard, tries to guess what sorts of news you’d be interested in, and goes...

Betabeat has interviewed magazine design icon Roger Black, who over the last few decades has been responsible for redesigns of a number of well-known magazines (including Rolling Stone, New York, the New York Times Magazine, and Newsweek. To say that Black is “famous” in the magazine design scene would be like calling Michael Jackson “well-known”. Black says that he is “flabbergasted” by how many people have bought iPads, “and even more so how the publishing industry thought it was some kind of magic pony that would save them.” But even so, Black seems to be adapting to the...