Why paid newspaper iPad apps aren’t working: Kohler

I tried to use an iPad as a laptop, I really did. Gave it two long, frustrating months, but that was enough. On Saturday I broke down and bought a new Macbook Pro. Oh, the bliss.

Regular readers may remember that in early June my laptop gave up the ghost at the same time as I bought an iPad. It’s lighter and much cheaper than a new laptop, so I decided to try to work with Steve Jobs’ tablet rather than buy a new computer.

I am now an expert on the limitations of the iPad. It only opens one application at a time; it won’t operate Flash, so many websites won’t work; it doesn’t have a good word processor; forget about doing much typing without a keyboard dock; the mail application is both clunky and limited.

It is, in short, built for media consumption, not media creation. It’s basically a big iPhone without the phone.

Okay, so having learnt that the hard way, questions remain – is it a good media consumption device? And will it save newspapers? Yes and no.

The iPad is great for watching videos – the YouTube application, which comes with the machine, is the most functional iPad app I’ve found, and the way movies are synced from iTunes on my desktop is very good.

It’s also good for reading books, as long as the light conditions are right – that is, you’re not sitting in the sunshine or under a glary reading lamp. The fact the iPad uses a touch screen means, of course, that it’s covered in fingerprints all the time, but I do prefer the backlighting of the iPad to the non-backlit screen of the Kindle.

The iBooks store app only seems to have free books that are out of copyright at the moment, but there are a number of other bookstores you can use for new releases.

The big problem for newspapers and magazines is that the second best app on the iPad is the Safari web browser. It works beautifully, and it means all of the free media websites work very well indeed.

I bought The Australian’s $4.99 app but soon reverted back to using its website instead, which is far richer and free. The same goes for virtually all of the newspaper apps currently available – the website has more stuff and works fine using Safari.

As a frustrated customer wrote in a rather damaging comment posted yesterday on the page where you buy The Australian in the app store: “I would say the only redeeming feature was that I downloaded content before a flight and was able to read it in transit. Other than that it has the same content as the website (less in some cases) and one must question what the hell I am paying for?”

The Australian is no different to other newspaper apps that you have to pay for, and any media company that is hoping the iPad is going to save its bacon by generating app sales revenue or subscriptions is going to face the same disappointment.

It’s simply that the iPad contains a perfectly good web browser. All of the same issues that are facing media companies on the internet – namely global competition, low barriers to entry and accountability of advertising, which is driving the price down – apply equally to the iPad.

And at the moment most media app developers are still trying to replicate the newspaper experience rather than trying something new. You can understand why – they know their customers are used to paying a subscription for newspapers, but if it looks like the internet, maybe they won’t.

There are a few developers that are experimenting with this new medium called the iPad app and coming up with exciting ideas (for example, the American ABC News, and France 24 are both excellent apps).

But they’re all free; subscriptions don’t seem to be working at all – simply because Safari is right there on the iPad desktop. Maybe if app developers start using the full capacity of Apple’s invention, with more videos, more interaction and recommendation-based navigation, and much more offline reading and automatic downloads, maybe then people will pay.

But I doubt it. It still comes down to having really good, unique content. Newspapers used to be able to make a lot of money with ordinary content because they had a cartel, so they never bothered innovating.

The only way an iPad could re-establish the media cartel and its profitability is if it could replace laptops and it wasn’t a good device for web browsing, so that the supply of media could be limited once more – instead of being everywhere, and free.

But as I have discovered the hard way it can’t do the first of those yet, and won’t ever do the second.

This article first appeared on Business Spectator