Next Issue Media is still six to eight weeks away from shedding any real details on its new e-reader application, publishing platform and storefront, but Managing Director John Squires continues to prep publishers on the role his new company will play in the evolving e-reader landscape.

Speaking at today’s American Business Media conference in Charleston, S.C., Squires reiterated the company’s goals without providing much new detail on the startup, which is backed by Time Inc., Conde Nast, Meredith, News Corp and Hearst. NIM’s goal, he explained, is to enable and streamline the process for publishing digital magazines on e-reader devices.

There are four key elements to the process:

• Common output feed standards. “You have to build to the machine,” said Squires. “The primary struggle is delivering something very readable to a 7-inch screen.”
• Consistent application environment. The goal is to provide a “harmonized” digital reading experience. “Readers don’t need five ways to navigate a TOC,” Squires said.
• Ad formats/ delivery protocol. “You don’t want to be directing a consumer off of your app and onto an advertiser’s website,” Squires said. “If they leave your app, they won’t come back. It will break the experience.” For this reason, NIM is working on methods that will enable advertising content to be ported into the publisher’s content management system.
• Print to digital workflow tools. A robust publishing platform is needed to deliver immersive content via multiple devices – with minimal rework by editors or producers and minimal incremental costs. “The biggest issue is simply how we publish,” said Squires. “How do you take content and get it optimized for the appropriate screen, so your readers love it and you don’t have to work too hard.”

Squires also reinforced the need for a new set of advertising metrics for e-readers. “We need to focus metrics on the 110 minutes of engagement someone spends with a publication – it’s more than just clicks,” he said. This includes better usage and engagement metrics for the digital video that will be served up in e-reader editions.

NIM is also focused on driving standards that publishers need for continuing to access the subscriber data upon which they’ve built their businesses – something they won’t have if they sell subscriptions through Apple’s app store. “We need to preserve the data you need for maintaining consumer relationships and advertiser relationships,” Squires said. “The publishing industry has amazing relationships with consumers. It is not lost on manufacturers of these devices that we have these relationships and that we want to preserve them.”

In response to a question about whether it makes sense for B2B publishers to invest resources in an iPad app, Squires stressed that no one’s forcing publishers to develop for e-reader platforms. It’s important that publishers have a business model in place before they invest significant resources.

“Part of our advantage is how hard it is to publish to the device,” said Squires. “It will take work to translate this content, which gives us time to get the business model right.”