Dispatches | October 05, 2009

I’d like to talk with uneducated speculation about market theory. This is outside my beat, but take a moment to read this Wired article. Yeah, someone is making a literary journal app for the I-phone/I-touch. Will it work? Depends how you put it.

Millions of people now own an I-phone/touch. Apps are new, and everyone is downloading them. They are cheap, easily accesible, a way to pursue your endless interests on a tiny gadget. I think there is an assumption that most people aren’t interested in reading short stories, poetry, etc. I BELIEVE, however, that this is only half-true at best, and what’s half true, is still false.

2 ideas.

1) Perhaps the reason why anyone is interested in anything is as much due to the marketing scheme than to the content of the product. Why don’t more people read literary journals? Maybe many people don’t know anything about them. This product gives more face to literary journals AND even if, out of the millions, only say 10,000 get this app. That is still twice the amount of circulation of a healthy Lit. Journal. Oh, and, they won’t pay paper costs, saving them a large sum of money.

2) It’s a no brainer that markets shift, they are ever-changing just like anything else in our world. In one of our meetings, I believe someone made a comment that Literary Journals need to be flexible. They can’t expect to survive, remaining ‘traditional’ in the way they operate. In my humble(sk) opinion, I think journals must evolve and find ways to do well, or they will constantly need to justify to the universities supporting them for why they should continue to do so.

So in conclusion: I should probably never be a wall street analyst, and props to the ‘Scarab’

-Eddie