I’m just getting started with my students at Hult International Business School, where I’m the course tutor on the elective module on Digital Publishing. We have our first class tomorrow.

I’m already excited by the amount of energy, enthusiasm and insight generated by the students, as evinced by their work setting up blogs and writing posts on an assignment I set up for the first week. The topics of discussion are as follows:

• What have been the most profound disruptions to media incurred by the digital revolution?
• Is it possible to preserve old forms of media organisation when data is digital?
• What new user behaviours are the most significant in terms of the future of digital media consumption and delivery?
• Discuss John Battelle’s definition of publishing in a digital era. Is there anything you’d change in his definition?
• What are the key ways in which digital publishing differs from pre-digital legacy publishing practices?
• Write a case study analysis and report on an existing digital publication

Below are links to the blogs published so far. For a broad range of insights and perspectives on the world of digital publishing they’re well worth a read:

• http://katetheprofessional.wordpress.com/
• http://eduardohauck.wordpress.com/
  
• http://cristinadresch.wordpress.com/
• http://digital-megan.tumblr.com/
• http://blanctigre.wordpress.com/
• http://surajatreyadigital.wordpress.com/
• http://www.framelova.com/blog/
• http://robinray1002.wordpress.com/
• http://swisswiz.wordpress.com/
• http://masterbymartha.wordpress.com/
• http://andrewmarkets.wordpress.com/
• http://pvpitou.wordpress.com/

Yesterday Amazon announced its latest quarterly financial results. One of the highlights was the news that ebooks for the Kindle are now outselling paperback books.

Since the beginning of the year Amazon has sold 115 ebooks for every 100 paperbacks sold. This is a remarkable turnaround, and one that has come a lot sooner than industry watchers expected.

Contrast this with the less than stellar performance of magazines in digital format. While iPad sales are soaring, iPad magazine sales are dropping dramatically.

So how come books are faring better on digital devices than magazines?

It’s too early to say for sure, but I have a theory that it’s all about simplicity.

Magazine interfaces on digital devices have mostly been far from intuitive. Compare magazine apps on the iPad and you’ll find a wide variety of different approaches. Each has different page and section layouts (some scroll vertically, some horizontally), broad variations in the user interface and often complex multimedia integration.

Usability specialist Jakob Nielsen concludes that iPad user experience problems are caused by an overly strong print metaphor and weird interaction styles. This will continue to be a problem until consistent interfaces emerge, as they did on the web.

While this works against magazines, it’s much less of a problem with ebooks. Books are linear, so navigation controls are much easier to learn. No instructions required, no complex user interface to grapple with.

Another reason could be the more obvious benefits of ebooks over their printed equivalents, including portability, social highlighting, instant dictionary definitions and digital notes.

The magazine experience, on the other hand, is a complex one, and porting this to a digital device is not as straightforward. As Editor at Large of Wired UK Ben Hammersley explains:

‘Print has its own grammar in striking photos, interesting design and typography, whereas for websites there’s video and flash-based content. Content for the iPad is completely different again and I don’t think many publishers have even begun to think about how to use its potential.’

Still, it’s early days for digital magazines and there are some interesting experiments that are sure to lead to better experiences.

I’m currently working with the APA and at our next digital breakfast we’ll be exploring the nature of content for the iPad with some excellent speakers, including Giles Colborne, Managing Director at CX Partners, and Mike Burgess, Head of Digital at Seven Squared, who will be talking about Virgin’s Project magazine on the iPad.

What do you think about magazines on the iPad? How could they be improved? I would love to hear your views in the comments below.

Okay, so we’ve known for some time that in online media the consumer is king. But is it just me or are consumers starting to demand a little bit too much? Is it starting to get a bit out of hand?

I love the clip below of Louis CK on how ‘Everything’s amazing and nobody is happy.’ I might just buy the T-Shirt.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s funny ‘cos it’s true – people are demanding a lot of technology companies. As Louis says in the clip, ‘how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago.’

Now think of some of the demands being made on leading tech companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Twitter. We want amazing stuff, at low cost, often free, and we don’t want ads on it, and we want our privacy protected, and if there’s any other business models you can think of outside of that, we don’t want you doing any of those either. Phew, tough times.

The onus is definitely on digital businesses to forge new and creative ways to monetise their products and services. I’m all for that. But I’m also sensing the start of a slight shift in emphasis. If we as consumers want all this cool stuff, maybe we’re going to have to compromise a little bit more too, whether it’s paying for valuable content or allowing our private information to be used by businesses for commercial ends.

Hopefully businesses and consumers can meet somewhere in the middle, where tremendous value is created for both.

I nearly called this post Content 2.0, but decided we’re all a little bit jaded with the 2.0 label these days.

Nevertheless the concept stands: content is making a comeback.

‘But I thought it never went away’ you might say, and in many ways you’d be right. But in the past few years the spotlight has been on radical new technologies, such as social media and microblogging, and shiny new platforms, like smartphones and tablet computers. Content skulked off into the wings and bided its time.

But over the past 12 months the word is slipping out that content is back on the agenda. Smart marketers have switched on to the fact that quality, targeted content attracts visitors from search engines, gets shared on social networks and establishes authority. This approach to marketing even has its very own new buzzword: content marketing.

With this second coming of content there is a whole lot more that needs to be learned. In the past ten years the rules have changed, and an effective content strategy needs to factor in all the shiny new things mentioned above, namely optimising for search engines, social media and mobile delivery.

Not only that but the competitive landscape is harder than ever. As more and more businesses are becoming media companies, there’s more competition for the top spots in Google and more content jostling for the customer’s attention.

The growth in the quantity of content isn’t slowing down either, quite the reverse. PR companies are circumventing traditional media and publishing direct. A new wave of media companies like Demand Media and AOL’s Seed.com are applying ruthlessly efficient algorithms to create ideas for content and then streamlining the content production process using a giant pool of low-cost freelancers. Demand Media found that their algorithm-generated content produced  4.9 times more revenue than the ideas that professional editorial people came up with (guess what happened to those editorial people).

It’s clear that in the age of the second coming of content, a mixture of new and old skills is required if you want your business to thrive. Knowing your audience, and providing them with high quality content that meets their needs, is more important than ever. But creators also need to maximise the opportunities provided by search and social media, and take on board more innovations that are doubtless coming our way in the near future.

It’s a challenging but exciting time to be in the content business.

We know things are looking tough for pre-digital ‘legacy’ publishers, and have been for some time. But during the past few weeks there have been signs that publishers are moving backwards not forwards, attempting to rely on the ‘old’ way of doing things to point the way forward in a digital world.

This attitude of looking backwards rather than forwards is dangerous because it takes the focus away from the much more important question that urgently needs attention – how can we do things differently in the future in a way that adds value to our customers, while providing publishers with a profitable business model?

Two things are happening right now that illustrate this point:

1. Rupert Murdoch’s paywall

Murdoch is planning to charge for access to The Times and Sunday Times online. Arguments have raged about this, but in essence, it’s not about whether the £1-a-day, £2-a-week strategy is a fair price, too much or too little; it’s about the fact that it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of how the internet works. As Jeff Jarvis puts it:

By building his paywall around Times Newspapers, he has said that he has no new ideas to build advertising. He has no new ideas to build deeper and more valuable relationships with readers and will send them away if they do not pay. Even he has no new ideas to find the efficiencies the internet can bring in content creation, marketing, and delivery.

The whole concept of charging £1 for access to a day’s worth of news is based on another media’s economics, another media’s distribution mechanism, another media’s business model. It is a step backwards.

2. The iPad as saviour of traditional publishing business model

I’m excited about the iPad. It looks great, beautiful and, yes, innovative.

But for some it seems to have triggered the idea that the re-bundling of unbundled media is the way forward. This is another step backwards.

The fact that digital media is fragmented and unpackaged is its greatest strength. To put it back together and create an enhanced ‘magazine’ or ‘newspaper’ experience on your computer is a move in the wrong direction.

All the great innovations that digital media brought us – search, aggregation, microblogging, the hyperlink itself – is undermined by this strategy.  As Clay Shirky puts it, with digital media ‘the decision about what to bring together into a bundle is made by the consumer and not the producer’ (see the video Clay Shirky on internet issues facing newspapers – link goes straight to discussion at 10 minutes 32 seconds. I should say that the exception, in my mind, is the long-form book format, which the iPad is well-placed to enhance).

The real danger with the two approaches outlined above is that by looking backwards to old ways of doing things you are putting yourself out of the running in the digital advance, and allowing other more nimble and focused competitors an even greater competitive advantage.

In other words, the more you look backward and your competitors look forward, the bigger the gap grows between you. This was brought home starkly last week in the other bit of news that caught my eye: Advertising Age’s report that print veterans looking to move into digital jobs are now finding it difficult:

There are now enough people who have digital experience that digital clients can hire them. They don’t have to worry about hiring from a tangential side of the business, i.e., print. But I think the other part of this, which is equally important, is that some digital clients wonder, if a print person hasn’t touched digital yet, what is that saying about them?

Okay so what’s the answer? Well if you haven’t already taken the step forward, do so now. Start imagining a different future for media. Read some of the great commentators out there who are thinking and acting on new ways of doing things (I recommend Buzz Machine, ReadWriteWeb, Econsultancy, Only Dead Fish and Mashable, for starters).

And (here comes the self-promoting plug) get some digital training.

And maybe look at committing to something even more intensive that ties into your commercial needs, for which I highly recommend the postgraduate course in Digital Publishing that I’m working on with Econsultancy and the Manchester Metropolitan University.

The main point is that to move forward we have to look forward, and that means not relying on business models and formats derived from legacy media.

I would love to hear your thoughts, so please leave comments below.