Apple iPad: Will it save publishing?

The problem with publishing isn't technological, it's the business model. For a couple of centuries, we've had nice business models for publishing, but the models are broken now and nothing new has emerged to take their place. The iPad is not going to be a savior of publishing, much as I love the iPad for other reasons and am eager to buy one.

The old business models for publishing evolved over centuries, and they worked well for a long time. Books are straight purchase transactions, people pay for what they buy. That isn't true for magazines and newspapers; single-copy purchases and subscriptions at best break even. Magazines and newspapers are funded by advertising.

Now, those business models are broken. Consumers have a great many other forms of media competing for their time, many of them free and brought to you by the Internet. Internet advertising has proven to be more efficient than print ads, and more efficient advertising is less expensive for the buyer, which means less money coming in to the sellers. That's why the sellers, the newspaper and magazine publishers, are hurting.

A new gadget won't solve that problem. What will solve the problem is finding something to sell that someone is willing to pay for and using that income to fund publishing. The iPad won't do that.

The iPad isn't the solution -- but it can be part of the solution.

The iPad includes its own online bookstore, as part of the iBooks e-book reader app. It's similar to the iTunes store for music and video. When iTunes launched, there was no popular way of legitimately purchasing music downloads. To obtain music, you either bought physical media such as CDs, or you got free bootleg music from services like Napster. iTunes demonstrated that people would be willing to pay for downloadable music, if you made it inexpensive and convenient enough. The same could well happen with books, magazines and newspapers.

But iTunes did not save music, TV and movies. The music and TV business are still struggling -- even as some musicians, who have adapted to the new economy, are doing pretty well.

On the other hand, movies are doing very well indeed, for reasons having nothing to do with Apple. George Lucas pointed out the reason why:

I always tell people, I say look, as long as Green Bay Packer fans go in the 70-below-zero weather, in the snow, to watch a game they can't actually see because they all want to be together and scream together and have a good time together, the movie industry is safe. And there will always be movie theaters. There will always be people that want that social experience, because people, human beings, are a social animal, and they will want something like the opera, like the ballet, you know, they will want to go and have this communal motion picture experience, or like plays and Broadway shows.

Movies are thriving because the central experience of moviegoing is Internet-proof. What is the equivalent experience for books, magazines and newspapers, the essential nature of those products, the thing that people will be willing to pay for? Once publishers can answer that question, the publishing industry will be on its way to recovery -- and the iPad might be a big part of that. But until we in publishing find an answer to that question, publishing will continue to struggle, even as the iPad succeeds.

For a contrary point of view, see Macworld's Kirk McElhearn. He argues that "payment for Websites alone won't be enough to change newspapers' and magazines' bottom lines from red to black. Apple's tablet, however, will." He provides the usual arguments why a free press is important to society:

Yet we need the press: the fourth estate is a necessary check for our government and business. As long as free thrives, the press can't do its job correctly. Free may be good for freeloaders, but it's bad for society. Those who want things to be free forget that there are still people doing the work they get for nothing, and those people need to be paid. As the old saw goes, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. (And, please, spare me the comments about how free will lead to other forms of income; this has been tried, and has been a massive failure, with only rare exceptions such as Google.)

McElhearn is absolutely right that journalism is important. And he's right that journalism will disappear unless people are willing to pay for it.

However, McElhearn fails to demonstrate why people would want to pay for journalism -- even on the spiffy iPad.

I find Clay Shirky's argument far more convincing. Shirky consults, teaches, and writes about the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He's an adjunct professor at NYU and a popular speaker at technology conferences. Shirky says journalism is simply going to die for a few years, and society is going to be worse off for it, until somebody invents a new business model -- or even better, many business models -- to support it.