Paraphrasing Jessica Cruel’s comment as Markus Dohle might have put it: “We know just how and where we want our audience to access our content and we’ll make sure they have no other choice.”
“PRINT IS DEAD AT ALLURE MAGAZINE” is the in-capitals headline in Beauty Matter, which may have book publishers shielding their eyes, but a peek through the fingers will reveal some valuable insights for the book publishing industry.
From Kelly Novack in Beauty Matter:
Conde Nast continues its digital pivot with the publishing giant announcing plans to shutter the print edition of its beauty tome Allure, and the December 2022 magazine will be its last.
Allure Editor-in-Chief Jessica Cruel explained:
Our brand is stronger than ever across social and digital and our success is testament to our collaboration as a team and because we know just how and where our audience is accessing content in today’s ever-changing landscape.
It’s our mission to meet the audience where they are and with this in mind, after our December print issue, we are making Allure an exclusively digital brand.
Meantime big publishers, not last Markus Dohle at PRH, will have us believe only 20% of book readers want to read digitally, despite the reality many more readers are enjoying digital books, as most recently explored at TNPS:
The reality of course is that print and digital books have many years of coexistence before them.
Magazines and newspapers seem to be succumbing to digital faster than books, and that’s primarily because printing and distribution costs are forcing up print prices for a product that has a short retail shelf-life. Ask yourself how many times have you ever seen a magazine backlist available on the shelf? In contrast, backlist magazines are a valuable source of revenue in digital format.
As we are seeing clearly with Barnes & Noble right now, backlist is where the action is, and this will continue to give retail value in the bricks and mortar world.
But the most important takeaway from Novack’s article in Beauty Matter is Jessica Cruel’s observation that “We know just how and where our audience is accessing content.”
Markus Dohle will tell us deadpan that PRH does too. 80% of the audience is print, 20% ebooks, he will tell us, and that will never change, adding solemnly, the audience will decide whether digital subscription for books will succeed.
But as explored over at TNPS, Dohle is being disingenuous. PRH removed ALL its titles from unlimited subscription making sure the audience cannot decide, because Dohle has already decided for them.
Paraphrasing Jessica Cruel’s comment as Markus Dohle might have put it: “We know just how and where we want our audience to access our content and we’ll make sure they have no other choice.”
Read Kelly Novack’s Beauty Matter article in full here.
This TNPS post first appeared on TNPS LinkedIn Pulse.
