So much for the future of publishing: digital page-turning magazine edition seller John Menzies Digital was today shut down just 14 months after it launched, taking with it the e-edition stores it operated for Asda, WH Smith and others. According to a holding message on JMD’s Magazinesondemand.co.uk: “Digital editions have not proved as popular as we had hoped and in this difficult economic climate it was not possible for us to continue trading.”
In a memo leaked to Mediaweek, John Menzies CEO Ellis Watson says the division was “looking down the line of too much future investment for too much uncertainty” and that the “worst consumer economy the world has seen” meant the plug had to be pulled.
Anyone who read my interview with JMD’s MD Sarah Clegg (pictured) in April will have seen that the business wasn’t on the steadiest of foundations. She made the startling admission that no ad team from any publisher had shown an interest in digital editions and was generally downbeat about publishers’ reluctance to experiment with them.
JMD had managed to tie up online distribution deals with 11 major publishers and had distributed more than 85,000 digital copies from 140 titles — but it never reached profitability and John Menzies, itself under big pressures to stay afloat in the physical newspaper and mag distribution market, decided its patience has run out.
Clegg had ambitious plans to bring digital editions to e-readers and install its own page-turning technology into to laptops (which is exactly what pan-European rival Zinio announced this week, in partnership with Sony). Some publishers — most notably Dennis with online-only titles such as Monkey — are making a go of digital editions and even expanding them abroad. Nevertheless it looks like the chances that e-editions will be an important addition to mainstream, printed magazines’ revenue are fading fast.
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