14 DAY TRIAL // At the recent Magazine Publishers Association conference, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt took the opportunity to present his view on the future of magazines, Mashable reports. He sees tablets pushing print and paper in a cone of shadow, as more users tend to purchase and use a slate on a regular basis.
“Tablets are now more popular than PCs. You can read it, it knows where you are, it has an accelerometer. There are all sorts of stuff [publishers] can do in tablet magazines [that they] couldn’t do in print magazines.”
Schmidt envisions that just five years from now, people will be getting their news form an “incredible immersive” app mounted on a tablet device sort of thing, which will offer access to countless digital magazines. The app will be able to offer customized experience to users and will tap into social graphs, location data and other features of sorts.
These additions should prove to be a gold mine for publishers, as they will be able to deliver more targeted ads thanks to location signals. And “more targeted” translates into “getting more clicks.”
Schmidt believes that ads are a very important part of the reading industry today because user attention spans are decreasing. So he prophesizes that we will soon abandon books and see the rise of something called “ADD type of reading.”