Tablet Readers Don’t Want Interactivity, Says Hearst President

Mashable reporting:
When Hearst first launched digital editions for the iPad, it loaded its titles with interactive features — features, Hearst President David Carey said, readers don’t necessarily want.
“We had to find out whether people wanted something all-new and interactive, or if they just wanted the magazine in mobile mode,” Carey recounted onstage at Mashable‘s Media Summit in New York City Friday. “The industry overshot the interactivity early on. What we discovered is that most people just want the product itself,” he explained, echoing the sentiments expressed by editors at The New Yorker and Popular Science.
In 2010, Hearst partnered with app developer Scrollmotion to develop richly engaging magazine apps for the iPad. The first issues of titles, including Esquire and O: The Oprah Magazine, were loaded with multimedia and interactive elements: photographs and graphic models that could be swiveled 360 degrees, illustrations that became animated upon touch. Audio and video made frequent appearances, too.
Esquire took over the development of its tablet edition from Scrollmotion beginning with its November 2012 issue. The issue still offers some of the same interactivity as previous issues, including videos and an animated cover, but certainly not as many as before.
“We were frustrated with how unstable the app was,” David Granger, Esquire‘s editor-in-chief, told me in an interview at Esquire‘s offices earlier this month. “We had a lot of complaints, a lot of bad reviews,” he said of the reason for switching to Adobe’s publishing software.
http://mashable.com/2012/11/30/hearst-tablets-interativity/