You complain again and again and again of Apple’s iPad being “a closed system.” Suppose it was made “open” (of whatever shape you imagine) – do you think this would have lessened the risk of content copyright/ libel/ ligitation? It’s a no brainer (and no 1000-word elucidation is necessary)

In conclusions, you declare to be “considering a purely digital magazine built on great content, beautiful layout and supported by a mixture of paid-for and clever and graphically attractive advertising.” I wish you good luck with your endeavor; however, if the above are your defining characteristics for a digital mag, then you are out of your depth.

Present-day iPad model will not be the last, nor the only one out there, but, with but 300cm^2 of screen real estate at your disposal, a viewport mere 25cm across [slightly less than A5 size, 20x15cm], do you really believe this to be sufficient display area to compete with no-ereader-hardware-needed near-A4-size deep color/ fine typography print magazines? Because they’re not going away overnight. If you want to survive in the emag market, you’ll have to offer something that’s unique to the medium, something the paper rags are incapable of giving. That means (for now) hypertext and multimedia – the latter limited by your wallet and target subscriber groups’ mean available bandwidth. Trust me, hypertext is easier, and more enthralling of the two.

As for your final conclusion of advisability of web paywalls “whatever their shape”… that’s where you start to wander. We all know that free web of the last 10+ years is slowly changing towards paid content. 25+ years ago nobody thought it viable that 10 years later we’d start paying for cable-TV. The free-for-all wwweb-experiment, where the only parties that consistently made money were backbone ISPs, while prime-content owners had to give it away to carve out mere presence, is coming to an end. Some new web will emerge, probably more chaotic than the current one, but with the major players there in new, paid-for guises. In parallel, a great number of electronically-distributed packaged content models will be tried out, and some will succeed. In this context the iPad is but Apple’s warning shot across the bow of/to publishers, to get their act together NOW (preferably with Apple onboard), or face the chaos of what comes after Murdoch et al. upsets the newscart [I could go on, but I've lost the thread somewhere - sure sounds like a line off Joni Mitchell, doesn't it?]

If Apple iTunes has 75% of the market for music, Apple’s share of the market for digital periodicals and digital books may be significant in a short span of time.

A printed newspaper does not need to discuss the manner of producing the printed page, because the audience does not interact with the document master from which the printed page was produced.

A digital periodical or digital book is different, because computerised composition distinguishes character information from imageable composition and computerised separation distinguishes colour information from imageable colourant.

The ability of the audience to interact with a digital periodical or digital book is determined by the degree to which the input of character information and colour information is intact in the digital document.

In other words, Apple’s architectures are part and parcel of the publisher’s product. If Apple chooses to censure publications that cover Apple architectures, then there is a problem that has no precedent in paper publishing.

Henrik Holmegaard
would-be technical writer

Arguably the effect of the injunction being imposed parallels possible action by Apple restricting access to content on the iPad.

However, by the time a judge lifted the injunction, the story was already common knowledge on the internet, just as was the case with Trafigura previously.

Ultimately, if because of the internet the information is going to become public knowledge anyway, any attempt at censorship is both self-defeating and doomed to failure. I suspect the danger of censorship, whether legal or commercial, is less than you fear and no greater than that which already exists.

Perhaps the more interesting problem is posed if Apple is the problem, and not a third party.

/hh