Publiyou: Publishing for the iPad as simple as 1-2-3
Posted by Mauricio Longo in Publishing on Apr 23rd, 2010 | 5 comments
Seqoy, a small company with headquarters in both São Paulo, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina is bringing to market a publishing platform that promises to make the process a snap. The platform called publiyou sports a minimalist interface on the iPad and includes social features such as sharing and commenting on your favorite stories.
Through the publiyou Website users can create their accounts, upload and manage their published content, manage statistics, payments, etc. The site will also be the main window for promoting the available content. Users submit the content for publication in PDF format, which just begs the question of how advertisement in the publications will be handled. The preview of iAd recently shown by Steve Jobs has left many people with a taste for just how interactive an ad might come to be on the iPhone and the iPad. Many people might not be willing to settle for a less interactive alternative.
The first pictures of the reader application for the iPad are quite impressive, though it is not possible to evaluate from them the level of interactivity and ease of use when actually reading a publication. Seqoy will be entering in direct competition with Zinio an established player in this market with dozens of publications already available. Differently from Zinio, Seqoy seems to be positioning itself as a completely self service platform, not to different from Apple’s App Store, where the publisher creates the content, publishes and manages its life cycle, all through the publiyou website.
Though financial details on how the service will work are not yet available, this positioning might make publiyou specially interesting for smaller publications which don’t have enough in-house resources to produce the sort of custom and highly interactive application we have seen presented by Wired, for example.
Entering this market must surely be an uphill battle, but this certainly seems like a good moment for such an initiative.
*Images: Seqoy
Although it’s good to see new players coming up in the arena, It is a bit disappointing to see “more of the same”…. not really exploring the potential of the tablet….
I think it is a bit soon to say how much of the potential of device will be explored by this platform, though the fact that the input is done through PDF would seem to limit how much can be done.
I am working on obtaining more information about the platform so that we can have a better picture of how it will work.
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I believe PDF can be a good starting point for digital magazines but the “page metaphor” is so used up and simply doesn’t make sense. Do we ride our cars as we have a horse carriage? no… just doesn’t make sense… it can work on a computer screen, but not on a tablet…
I’m still reserving my judgment on that question. I’ve heard it put in exactly the opposite terms. Why are we still using scroll as if we were using a desktop computer. This is a tablet, you should have your content as pages.
I’m still being open minded at this point. I’ll wait until I’ve played with several applications (publications?) which use each mode before passing my judgment on what should stay and what should go.
Mauricio:
I agree with you… in a way This is a new type of digital experience, more similar to book handling but totally digital.
Some considerations:
1. I believe Pages is the way to go… but the flipping thing is a poor metaphor for this.
2. Scrolling is not something from “desktop” but inherent to the digital experience itself. The scrolling, as we know it from webpages, is not suitable for this new kind of device…..
3. This is a physical experience for a digital model, that’s why the SWIPE is the way to go…. as a mix of both worlds…
We are now learning the possibilities of this new species of digital devices. I also have more questions than answers…
Parabéns pelo Blog…