Though Craig's article was thoughtful, and I would enjoy his proposed product, I had two strong reactions:

1. I disagree with the premise that what digital publishing needs is a "subcompact" MVP. A cruft-free experience would be delightful, It just doesn't seem particularly progressive or innovative.

2. After quoting Clay Christensen so much it seemed like a cop-out to suggest that this disruptive system would revolve around monthly subscriptions.

It's easy to criticize from the sidelines, of course, but I find new tools like Tapestry and Scrollkit more interesting than The Magazine.

What about you?

I think that Craig leans a little heavy on The Magazine as his proof point. I think The Atavist are doing some really interesting things in the form of story telling that are completely the opposite of what Craig argues for.

Did you see that The Awl launched something similar? theawl.com

I really liked a lot of what Craig had to say. He also makes it sound easy and fun, which is inspiring.

One thing: "Newsstand is perhaps the most underutilized, under-imagined distribution tool in the short history of tablet publishing."

Well... yes! That is probably true. And I think a number of forthcoming products from 29th Street Publishing will make Newsstand worth its while. ( 29.io )

But also... Newsstand is also really incredibly complicated to deal with. It's magical, and I'm glad it exists! And it works. But there are so many unintended, un-great elements to the process of Newsstand, particularly in the way subscriptions work. And the Apple approval process with magazines, just like apps, seems long-term untenable.

So is disruption in the form of distraction free reading?

I don't know about you all, but the biggest constraint to me reading/watching anything NEW is time, not it's availability.

I subscribed to The Magazine. And so far it is good, but it has yet to out weigh the publications and streams that I am currently getting quality reads from. It is a well designed app, simple and I like the idea of utilizing Newsstand, given that it is most likely an empty space on a couple of million iPhones at the moment.

But for something new to make it into that part of my mind (a.k.a. the market) that says, "Hey remember that thing you subscribed to? You should go read that instead of this other thing!", it had better be more interesting than a new delivery method, or shoving content into a yet-unfilled hole.

Thanks, Josh. Letter to Jane is compatible with the subcompact model, but no one would mistake Tim's designs for the Awl's. As with Marco's Magazine, our apps are all magazines & newspapers that we look forward to reading. They share design elements, but no two of them look exactly alike.

Some projects will offer wholly and partially ad-supported subscriptions. I think that the model Choire hints at in his piece - allowing sponsors to be "the underwriter of great editorial content" is promising for the web and tablet alike. The "disruption" is going to emerge from companies like 29th Street Publishing (where I work), Arc90, Atavist, and others working to make sure writers can get paid without compromising the reader's experience.

@jeremy I think this is a good point. Presentation is one part of the problem but distribution or the ability to create an audience is another.

I am totally into the idea of utilizing Newsstand, but are we thinking about what the experience will be like for the reader who has downloaded 10-15 of these?

What is the messaging model? Is it every app for itself? Will I even remember that I am giving $1, $2 a month for issues I open up? Will there be a limit to how many issues you can buy at one time?

Jeremy, Newsstand is only a part of the story because that's the mechanism by which Apple enables background downloads & recurring subscriptions.

Our model is that every publication is it's own app. Your relationship should be with the publisher, with as thin a layer of software in between as possible. When you have 8 or more Newsstand apps, the shelves scroll (like an app folder in OS X).

To answer your subscription question, in the iTunes model, you get reminder emails before your monthly or yearly subscriptions renew.

The actual mechanics of the transaction are time consuming to get right, but ultimately I think they are the less interesting side of the conversation.

"Our model is that every publication is it's own app."

What's the motivation for maintaining the concept of a publication, at all? Why not make every article an app, a la Robin Sloan's "Fish" tap essay app? Especially since publishing is trending towards individuals/personalities (see Nate Silver, etc.)

My hunch is that personal brands matter more than publication brands, because of the Internet: joshm.co

For whatever reason, I'd pay $1.99 for Clay Shirky's next blog post or Robin Sloan's next tap essay, but wouldn't pay $1.99 for an issue of Gizmodo. But maybe that's just me...

@josh So would that be Ultra-compact Publishing? :)
I think Craig's manifesto actually describes something much closer to what you're describing above than, say, The New Yorker iPhone app which shoehorns the entire print issue onto a mobile screen.

...and his example, The Magazine, is much more about Marco and his own loyal audience than "The Magazine" as a publication.

Definitely, which is why I don't understand why he doesn't push himself one step further?

It's compact publishing, but still has five articles...
We're standing on a table and looking down, but it's still subscription based...

I would much rather invest in an editorial team than buy an issue or series of issues that I may not read.

One of the main reasons I am reluctant to subscribe to print magazines is because pile up, and then there is an expectation to read them before the next one comes, because I am locked in this relationship for a year. This is the guilt trap.

@josh I have a hunch that the Longform guys are thinking about publishing in that way... at author-level instead of the publication-level.

Thanks for the shout out to scroll kit Josh.

I like the sentiment behind Craig's manifesto but not most of the recommendations. The Magazine had some great writing (notably from alex payne) but all of the articles in there would have worked just as well in an actual physical magazine. The Magazine does not taking advantage of what makes iOS an intriguing place to tell a story. It's text with nice navigation from someone who already has a large audience.

In some sense I think subcompact publishing is still too big. Those who want to really push publishing on the web can start by trying to craft a single experience that really gets people to slow down. That's why I thought robin sloan's 'fish' was so amusing. If you took all the text from that piece, and pasted it into tumblr, it would not have made that good of a post. This was also the case for the posts dustin curtis put out before he got the audience to build svbtle ( dustincurtis.com ). It takes time and expertise to craft these experiences, lowering that bar is what we're working on with scroll kit.

I unpacked some of these thoughts in post I made this summer that was also somewhat of a manifesto: scrollkit.com

To your point, Cody, that's what made Craig's post so appealing. He clearly spent a lot of time crafting the experience of that individual post: the large car photo at the top, the beautiful table of contents, the photos in the margins. It's why I was enticed to read it even though it was so long.

I think there's something to be said for crafting original reading experiences, tailored to each piece of content. See: Robin Sloan's "Fish," Craig Mod's "Subcompact Publishing," and, heck, EVERYTHING that Bret Victor does.

The Magazine is beautiful, elegant, but at the end of the day I don't think it's any different than a beautiful Tumblr template.

Well... you know, words are a craft too! Ahem. Ah, you design people. Lord knows I love you, and cannot live without you, but sometimes I really do want to lock you in an ugly room to make you suffer.

Jeremy, your point really cuts to the heart of the finances of this all, which is really much harder to discuss and solve: "I would much rather invest in an editorial team than buy an issue or series of issues that I may not read." The process of subscription--or one-time purchase--is currently the only way to make that investment. (Or, at least, at a low price. For five figures, you can be a presenting sponsor; for seven, you can probably be an investor!)

I just find it a little strange to tie a revenue stream to a device or single reading experience for sites that are cross platform.

I would much rather have The Awl know who I am, how often I come there (regardless of what device) and remind me why I love reading. Then offer me a donate button (+Get a free Awl Tote! sort of j/k).

In fact, if @choire were to put a donate button on his site, I would add $30 today.

I'd love to pay web designers and developers by donation too, but I suspect that's not going to happen anytime soon.

I have a payroll, Jeremy! What do they say when you bring "the tip jar economy" model up at the office?

Why are people treating publishers as anything other than a business? For pay products, you're a customer. You can choose to pay, or choose not to. For free products, you can make that choice more casually or fuzzily, or out of more pureness, but only because you're being subsidized for your visit.

I hear you, Choire. It's very easy for us to yell, "MORE DESIGN!" and "JUST PUT A DONATE BUTTON!" from the sideline. But I know I have no idea what I'm talking about.

With that in mind, I'd like to float one (ignorant) thought out there:

What record companies failed to realize, when Napster, et al. came around, is that people didn't care about the album view anymore. They just wanted the single that they liked. (see: shirky.com )

I think it's similar for publishing now. I don't want to pay for New York Magazine but I would donate to a Kickstarter that funded Paul Ford to write one article/week for a year.

I don't want the publication view, just like I don't want the album view.

@choire I was talking about something with far more logic than just the tip jar model. I think we all agree that a stand alone donate button will not work. And I am in no way advocating that reading should be free.

But I do want to pay for some of the better publications I read — like The Awl — and I want you to get paid so you can keep publishing The Awl. I just find it a little strange for this to be device specific.

I wonder how well Wikipedia is doing with their fundraising campaign.

"And I am in no way advocating that reading should be free."

Jeremy, I believe that's what you meant, but that's not what you wrote. :) And I say that as a fan of yours. The big idea is to figure out the most efficient and fairest way to get writers & publishers paid for their work.

The iTunes model doesn't hold up, because writing shouldn't be hits-driven. Music is promoted and created completely differently than novels and essays, and with good reason. If there was a market for 1.99 blog posts, then I think we would have found it by now, because there are many tools to enable that kind of transaction.

I'm enjoying this branch! Thank you, @joshm, for hosting.

In the last Wikipedia fundraiser, ending January of this year, one million-plus people globally contributed, in total, a bit more than $20 million. The company's budget last year was $28.3 million.

Wikipedia is, notably, maintained by a devoted nonprofit.

Also notably, on average last year it got 2.7 billion pageviews a month--in the United States alone. Let's round that off to 34 billion a year.

So Wikipedia is monetized at 0.0005 dollars per page viewed. (I believe that's $2000 for 4 million pageviews.) The only kind of company that could subsist on that is one run by an immense army of totally unpaid staffers.

If the new business models were self evident they would be done. Going back to Josh's original point, the subcompact model doesn't really have a disruptive payment model baked in nor does anyone believe it works at scale. Christenson would say that disruptors pick off the overserved and improve over time. I'm not sure I see that at play here.

Oh, my. So much to respond to but let me, for now, just pick this easy one:

"He clearly spent a lot of time crafting the experience of that individual post: the large car photo at the top, the beautiful table of contents, the photos in the margins. It's why I was enticed to read it even though it was so long."

This is super duper deliberate. I try to be as ... considerate? as possible to the reader on these longer pieces. Which means not presenting them with a wall of text.

Subcompact Publishing clocks in around ... 5,000 words? It's crazy long. But I try to — by using images, headers, subheads, etc — make it feel chunkable and conquerable.

I don't think I said this, but I thought your piece was really both gorgeous and thoughtful, Craig.

As long as we are pandering. I also thought it was an amazing piece as well
twitter.com

Craig - can you offer any perspective to some of the thoughts here?

Aww, pander away ;)

FWIW I probably spend far too much time on that floating "Contents" navigation to get it to work exactly as I wanted. (Still a few bugs ...)

Related:

Regarding the Newsstand comments:
"But also... Newsstand is also really incredibly complicated to deal with."

The most egregious misinterpretation of Subcompact Publishing must be that I'm saying things like Newsstand are perfect and complete. I definitely don't think that! Newsstand has scaling issues as pointed out above.

That iBooks and Newsstand and iBooks Author are separate and incompatible speak to the disjointed philosophy within Apple around reading/publishing on tablets.

There's an opportunity to build The Newsstand Replacement. (And I think an app like Flipboard is in the perfect position to do so.) But for now, it's there, and it can work well bound by its own limitations.

Did you handcode it craig or mod something that was already built?

And yes, re Jeremy's link. I think this trend is going to get much bigger in 2013. Also, related and from Nieman last year: niemanlab.org

Hand hobbled.

Problem is, it's already hard enough to write (for the vast majority of people), expecting folks hand-craft UIs to each piece of content is asking a lot.

It really is such a spectrum. PG vs Bret Victor. Both are amazing reads, with completely different aesthetic approaches.

Oh, no, it's madness.

If I had a team of eager interns it'd be the first thing I'd offload onto them.

@josh

It is asking for more from them but this is a feature as much as it is a bug. When everyone can already publish on the internet, you need to do more to get attention.

In some ways a branch is like that too. Tweeting out a question is easy for me but if the question is more important I may want to put more craft into the setup. Branch comes with anxiety, I risk offending people who I didn't invite and feeling embarrassed when people ignore my invitation but I'll do it when it's important.

But yes, it's also a spectrum, some become known for distinctive designs and others stick to minimalism. @dcurtis used one to transition into the other.

Good point, Cody. Again, that's a big reason why I read Craig's post. Though it was long, if he had taken so much time to craft the look and feel of it then I assumed he was equally careful and thoughtful with the content itself.

I love the language of publishing being made more compact, because it hints at something: The value of most kinds of digital content per se is or is approaching zero. There are special cases and luxury goods and there will always be, but most content by itself doesn't have realizable value.

That said, the relationship between maker and consumer (publisher and reader) is, or could, have a lot of value. Thus @Jeremy's comment that he'd rather invest in the editorial team behind Awl than pay for blog posts. I'm as skeptical as @Choire about the "tip jar economy"—the relationship has got to go deeper than just passively asking for money. But I do think "selling" a relationship rather than selling content is fertile ground for experimentation.

'But I do think "selling" a relationship rather than selling content is fertile ground for experimentation.'

I am flummoxed! Isn't this exactly what large publishers have been trying to do for decades, and failing? Isn't this exactly how we got into the mess we're in now, with people expecting creative work (not just writing - but also music, software, and movies) for free?