Richard Branson’s Virgin Digital Book Publishing company on Tuesday launched “Project,” a digital lifestyle magazine, exclusively for distribution on the Apple iPad.
The magazine, which will reportedly feature multimedia content, will be priced at US$2.99 an issue.
This is the second digital magazine created exclusively for the iPad announced by a major company; the first was “The Daily,” from News Corp. (Nasdaq: NWS), which is scheduled to be launched next year.
Will Virgin’s endorsement of the iPad as a publishing platform undermine publishers’ consortium Next Issue Media, which is trying to squeeze Apple by launching a digital newsstand on the Android platform early next year?
The Book Publishing Project Has Landed
“Project” was created jointly by Virgin Group and UK multimedia book publisher Seven Squared. It’s a monthly magazine that will change as often as minute-by-minute to give readers up-to-date news.
The publication is based around design, entertainment, technology and entrepreneurs. It will have its own staff, and it will also encourage contributions from the public.
“Project” is edited by Anthony Noguera, formerly editorial director of men’s lifestyle magazines at H. Bauer, the largest privately owned publisher in Europe. The publication’s art director is Che Storey, formerly of Arena and Men’s Health magazines.
The cover story for the first issue focuses on Jeff Bridges. Other subjects include Yamauchi Kazanori, the developer behind the “Gran Turismo” game series.
“Project” claims to have landed top-flight advertisers, including Lexus, American Express (NYSE: AXP), Panasonic, Ford UK and Ford Canada.
Readers Heart Digital
Consumers apparently love their tablets — an online survey of more than 1,800 consumers conducted by Harrison Group and Zinio in September found that 13 percent of consumers are interested in buying a tablet-based device within the next 12 months.
The survey also found that 55 percent of tablet and e-reader owners who read digital content are consuming more digital content than they expected, and that 33 percent are spending more on buying digital content.
That led the Harrison Group to forecast sales of more than 20 million tablets and e-readers next year.
“This is a continuation of the trend in that you’ve got a whole host of devices that are receptacles for Internet-based content,” Frank Dickson, a vice president of research at In-Stat, told MacNewsWorld. “You’re seeing reconfiguring of content, which is already in digital form for another medium, whether it’s the iPad, the Nook, the Kindle or the smartphone,” he added.
“Before the iPad, book publishers tended to think they had to choose whether consumers wanted to read content in print or in digital format,” Jeanniey Mullen, a spokesperson for Zinio, told MacNewsWorld. “Now they’re finding people may love print, but they want digital access as well so they can take their digital device with them and read on the go.”
The Agony and the Ecstasy of the iPad
The iPad has forced the publishing industry to take digital media seriously, Mullen said.
“When the iPad came out in April, it was the first time that the publishing industry began committing design and strategic resources to building up digital readership,” Mullen explained.
Strong consumer demand has made the iPad the spea
Massive, worldwide success often remains a bit enigmatic, but this book publishers breakthrough seemed especially unlikely. The first novel begins with the dull thud of a family tree full of foreign names: The book starts slowly — digging into arcane corporate finances — and the ensuing novels get longer, sometimes nearly skidding to a halt while recounting the structure of a government bureau. The books’ politics are radical-feminist and anti-capitalist left, they’re set in a country most Americans have never visited and the prose is translated, at times inelegantly. They’re certainly, in a days of declining attention spans, not taut.
But Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy has become the book publishing companies phenomenon of the young century, with international sales exceeding 45 million. Three films have been produced in Larsson’s native Sweden — the trilogy’s conclusion, “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” will be released here Friday — and David Fincher has begun shooting a big-budget Hollywood version starring Daniel Craig.
Larsson’s books have managed, in the 25 months since the first novel’s U.S. publication, to go through almost 200 printings here. “That’s crazy!” says Paul Bogaards, spokesman for Alfred A. Knopf. “The category leaders in thrillers or mysteries take years to get there, if they get there at all.”
Financially, Larsson’s success has few parallels in book publishing. Other authors have sold in the millions, but none has sold as many as quickly as Larsson has. His book publisher estimates that by year’s end, they will have sold 15 million copies in 2010, or roughly the equivalent of recent works by John Grisham, Dan Brown, Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King combined.
The books, Bogaards says, “have had a significant impact on our bottom line. The series has exceeded all projections; indeed, it blew all the models to bits.”
And Larsson has managed to do it without a single bookstore signing, author appearance or Charlie Rose interview: He died at 50, in 2004, not long after turning in the manuscripts for the three books. So what’s going on here?
“The truth is, I’m not sure, either,” Knopf Doubleday chairman Sonny Mehta says when asked about the enigma of the novels’ broad popularity. “It raises my spirits to see that people can go crazy about a set of books.”
The series, which was a sensation in Scandinavia — selling several million copies in Sweden alone — years before translation into English, has dominated bestseller lists across much of Europe. With the addition of Mongolia and Georgia, Larsson’s books are now in print in 46 countries, and have begun to make inroads in Taiwan (350,000 copies sold so far), Japan, China and South Korea.
The books had already become huge hits in Sweden when Mehta was handed a rough translation of the first novel at the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair.
“It was the complexity of the thing,” Mehta, a longtime reader of crime fiction, says of what grabbed him. “Sort of an ambition.”
Complex, ambitious novels don’t always strike a chord with American readers, especially those from Europe. The trilogy’s central installment, “The Girl Who Played With Fire,” became the first translated work to debut at the top of the New York Times bestseller list in more than 25 years.
Knopf has long published Larsson’s fellow Swede Henning Mankell — whose grim police procedurals have an international following — and Maj Sjöwall and
