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Thou shalt not get this “tablet” thing wrong

Posted in: Technology, Trends, by: Mario Garcia

Dec 06, 2009
11:13 PM

Not since Moses stood on his mountain has there been so much talk about tablets. But this time it’s not in the biblical sense. These tablets are e-readers, gaming devices, gps systems, high-def video and music players and totally interactive. And that’s just a few of their features. Do I know this for sure? No. The blog world is filled with rumors and sightings of these tablets, and “major announcement” dates are speculated and pass like the many predicated Armageddons. But make no mistake, something is coming, something that will change (once again) they way we experience media and the way we engage readers and users.

One of the many renderings found online of the rumored Apple tablet.

Recently, Sports Illustrated released a demo of their tablet magazine. And to their credit it’s more than just flipping through digital pages of the magazine. You can rearrange the order of stories to read whatever you want, scan through entire photo galleries, and best of all, see the swimsuit edition come to life with video. It’s quite impressive. The interface looks great, lots of drag and drop and the “cool” factor seems to be sustainable from issue to issue.  But I think it only scratches the surface of possibilities, both from a reader experience and from a business perspective.

Recently, we were tasked by a client to think about their print product as a digital magazine. The obvious place to start was with the current content structure of the print product. We started breaking down the sections and departments, then it hit me that we may be doing this wrong. If we’re thinking about a new medium, a totally different way to experience something, then why are we limiting ourselves to existing content? The strategy should be to explore the new technology and functionality offered by the tablet, then develop content around that, offering audiences a truly different way to experience your brand. This way, reading the stories is just part of a larger experience that could include other activities like shopping, chatting with another user, learning, playing etc.

The SI digital magazine hints at this towards the end of their demo, which is encouraging. I still remember the rush in the mid 1990s to “hurry and put newspapers online.” It was a flawed approach and we’re seeing the repercussions of it now. We’ve already started hearing “make a digital version or app of my newspaper.” There’s no such thing as a digital version of a newspaper. A touch screen is not paper. The promise of these tablets is something different, something useful and beneficial, not gimmicky. If the goal is to make users pay for this experience (and if it’s not, then please check your medication), then IT MUST BE MORE THAN YOUR NEWSPAPER OR MAGAZINE IN TABLET FORM. The bar needs to be set higher if these tablets are to give print media organizations another chance to get it right as one MSNBC article suggests. Now, if only Moses could proclaim it from the top of a mountain.