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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Atlantic Kindles the Story: Does Mobile Make Piecemeal Content Work?Tuesday, December 8, 2009 Exploring yet another way to leverage the new world of portable devices, yesterday The Atlantic launched a novel program for  selling short stories by-the-piece on the Amazon Kindle eReader. Two short stories will be available each month in the exclusive series. The stories can be accessed on the dedicated Kindle devices, on the Kindle for PC software or via the iPhone Kindle app. The inaugural stories in the series “The Atlantic Fiction for Kindle” are Edna O’Brien’s “Shovel Kings” and Christopher Buckley’s “Cynara.” Both are available as one-shot purchase for $3.99 from the Kindle Store. Upcoming authors in the series include Curtis Sittenfeld, Paul Theroux and Stuart Nadler. With The Atlantic’s century-old legacy of advancing fiction and the story in particular, this is a new distribution model that fits the old brand nicely. “The Amazon Kindle presents us with a powerful new way to support great writing and sustain the thoughtful dialogue it inspires,” says Justin B. Smith, president, The Atlantic in a statement. Notably, this project also tries to extend an online model of selling articles by-the-piece that never succeeded on the Web. Recent projects surrounding paid online content like Steve Brill’s Journalism Online LLC have revived the notion that users may pay for access to individual articles. The short story offers a unique value proposition in this regard. It is a discrete and rich experience that has a demonstrated higher value when collected into single volume purchases. Mobile platforms may tap a use case and a situation that is more conducive to the model than the Web has been. A short but deep content experience may map more closely against the ways in which people absorb content on the go. Certainly magazines like The New Yorker and Esquire also have an opportunity with this model. But good luck finding this new Atlantic content. After searching for “Atlantic” and “Atlantic stories” via the Kindle on iPhone” we finally were able to land a hit when searching Edna O’Brien’s name in the Kindle store. Ultimately we did see the story collection featured in Amazon’s page of “Kindle Exclusives,” but it was not promoted on the Atlantic’s own Kindle page in the catalog or on the general Kindle Magazines page. Promotion and merchandising will be key to making any piecemeal content like this work on a remote device. An interested audience needs an easy way to make their way to the content, and the content needs to find an easy way to its target audience. For instance, Amazon seems to offer no alerting mechanism for letting the user know of new stories available in the series. Ideally, a publisher would want to target their own natural audience first, but the Kindle does not have the same sort of alert mechanism as an iPhone App. Also, if The Atlantic is promoting itself as a curator of great fiction (which it is), then why wouldn’t a dedicated reader want to subscribe to the product as a service for a lower fee? So far as we can tell that model is not available here, although it would follow naturally from the value proposition the magazine brand represents. Piecemeal content models can make sense on mobile devices theoretically. But the content requires richer ways of reaching the right user, locking that subscriber into the content, and allowing the user to share the discovery with others. As magazine companies plan to band together to distribute their wares in various forms and across multiple devices, the issue of discovery and distribution will become at least as critical as pricing, content formats and the affordability of devices. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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