The publishing industry has undergone a massive transformation in the last decade, with mobile and portable devices opening the door to digital content that wasn’t as easily and freely available before. E-books, online magazines and other multimedia content now abund and seriously challenge the supremacy that traditional and paper based products had before.
Not only digital media challenged traditional media in the adoption rate, but it is also becoming increasingly attractive for advertisers that are shifting their budgets towards digital channels year over year.
One of the reasons behind this shift is that not only digital media attract more users, but it also allows advertisers to target their message to a better profiled audience.
In some countries digital advertising revenues already surpassed traditional advertising and where it didn’t happen yet, it is set to happen in 2021.
The solution to changing preferences in the Publishing Industry
Most of the major consulting companies agree that publishers and editors should reposition their products and start mixing innovative and engaging experiences into their traditional offer.
A lot of people are still attached to paper products and rather than completely replacing them, they’ve started making it complementary with digital products.
Digital and Paper can live together as they offer profoundly different user experiences. So why not contaminate paper products with engaging content that readers typically expect to experience only on digital products? To us that is the key to rejuvenate the image of paper products and making them more attractive. There are plenty of options to achieve this goal and we believe that Augmented Reality plays a crucial role in this process.
Augmented Reality Books
There are certain book genres that would benefit a lot from an integration of multimedia content enjoyed in Augmented Reality. Just think about technical and scientific books with a lot of images, schemes and illustrations, they may be complemented by videos, animations, infographics and 3D models, making the reading and learning process much more effective.
Augmented Reality Magazines
Today we have quite a few examples of magazines that have embraced Augmented Reality as a part of their content offering. Telling a fact or a news with the aid of interactive media provides the reader with an experience that is a hybrid between the traditional and the digital ones.
Just here in Italy we have quite a few examples of magazines that are offering AR content to the readers with Focus by Mondadori being the most popular one, with over 100.000 readers having downloaded the AR app to enjoy the multimedia content.
Augmented Reality Newspapers
Newspapers are probably the category that lost more ground in sales because of the shift of many users to digital channels to stay informed. Paper newspapers have to be printed every night and distributed in the whole country in a matter of hours, making it a continuous challenge.
Editorial offices have to work very quickly to get the work done in time and sometimes, as the newspapers are being printed, they are already out of date because something else happened.
Augmented Reality could help editors to provide newspapers with up to date information, since the AR content can be prepared and/or updated, even once the newspapers are out.
Augmented Reality School Books
Just like technical and scientific books, school books are often full of images, illustrations, infographics, that serve the purpose of helping students to understand more effectively what’s being taught in that book.
Imagine students studying the solar system while pointing a device to their book and watching the animation of the planets moving around the sun in 3D, or also studying history by watching small clips taken from documentaries that provide appropriate in depth information related to those facts.
How AR-media can support Publishers in the transition
Augmented Reality can support publisher transition to a hybrid model of traditional and digital media, offering paper products with additional multimedia content attached to a certain number of pages.
With this approach readers can continue to enjoy a product they are attached to, while benefiting from the innovation of digital content like videos, 3D models, 360 photos and videos and so on.
Moreover, with the aid of data analytics and push notifications, publishers can build and nurture a relationship with their readers and have a better understanding of their preference in terms of types of content, by analyzing which pages have been scanned the most and how long the reader spent on each one of them, that are typical tools available to online publishers.
In this scenario AR-media is the ideal tool to build and publish Augmented Reality projects for Publishers, as it requires no coding skills and allows the user to create AR content with a visual, simple workflow. Get a free AR-media account and start creating, you can rely on detailed tutorials and documentation available in the support section.