Indy publishing 0.1

Mid march, 2010, SXSW in Austin, Texas. The iPad has just become available for pre-orders on apple.com, and after watching Steven Colbert be (almost) cooler than Jay-Z on TV it’s the talk of the town, the wet dream, the bees knees for the crowd at SXSW. We’d taken the trip to hear what the industry had to say about this hopefully revolutionary publishing platform, have some Texan BBQ, and hang out with friends 

We went to a lot of talks about tablets, touch screens, and smart phones and absorbed everything on stage and in social layers of the crowd. The old media dinosaurs were everywhere. It was literally impossible to escape the old media preaching about tablets and their vision of the prominent digital future. It was a lifesaver. The lifesaver. For everyone! All software houses in the creative industry and the publishers continued talking (not much discussion as almost everyone seemed to have agreed beforehand) throughout the weekend, and by monday we could see the direction everyone was running in; the goal was to sell more paper issues. Lots more. There was a tone of clinging on to the status quo. Having readers and customers migrating to this unknown model was not something old media wanted to see happen anytime soon. 

So, we did the only sane thing to do. We went for lunch. Probably had something greasy to eat. And with that came a great idea. With the early years of the web relatively fresh in mind we agreed it was going to take the dinosaurs years to see, explore and invent anything remotely interesting for this new platform. We figured we had an opening of 18-25 months before they fired their current management and got hold of talent. How about we do this ourselves? Let’s make our own magazine. No print cousin to be drawn upon, no old skeletons in the closets to hold us back. Jut us and the iPad magazine; produced, designed and published by ourselves. The year of indy magazine mayhem was upon us.

As everyone know by now the initial publications were all huge successes for about one issue. But all of them underwhelmed their users. They were of course looking for and expecting nothing less than the revolution in digital interactive content we all heard so much about. However, the incentive for anyone in the old publishing world to migrate users to a digital platform was not a great one and they were avoiding the issue and media platform completely by releasing plugin-generated pdf issues with the occasional button to change an image. That’s the equivalent of building a state of the art digital 3D cinema on Hollywood boulevard and only screen old silent movies. So our initial thoughts were right. 

Only in the last few months there has been some  examples of iPad magazines that are actually grasping at the idea of the potential of the platform. Publishing for touch, doing actual interactivity and dynamic content. This said, the media goes on about the glorious RSS readers out there wrapping web content into nice pretty packages for the readers to consume instead of actually challenging the platform in any way or form.

Today, about a year and a half down the road from a greasy lunch in Texas, we´re only a few weeks from launch of the first issue of Katachi Magazine. As part of the imminent release of our first issue we’re launching this blog. Over the next few weeks we´ll be talking about how we got here, the iPad, content, creating your own opportunities, publishing, and the business and market in which we see fantastic possibilities for interactive magazines and books. And last but not least; the uprising of indy publishing and how we intend to scare the bejesus out of the old old dinosaurs of the industry.