Google gains patent for personalised print-on-demand magazines
Google has been granted a patent application which suggests that the search giant is looking at ways of creating printed magazines on point-of-sale devices that create personalised magazines based on aggregated content, TechCrunch reported this morning.
The patent describes a method, hardware and software for “creating an on-demand point-of-sale printed publication including… personalised content and the personalised advertisement”.
Google’s patent applications says traditional printed publications’ weakness is that their content and advertising is determined centrally by publishers rather than personalised by the user. “Since consumers have no control over publication content or advertisements, they may purchase a publication that contains at least some content and advertisements that may be of no interest to them,” the document says.
Online news aggregators (like, say, Google News) meanwhile, “fail to enable a consumer to create a customised publication containing personalised content from a variety of sources… and containing personalised advertisements.”
The application goes on to describe an invention that “may provide an on-demand point-of-sale printed publication containing user selected content from multiple content sources and relevant advertisements”.
While the content would come from user-defined publications or searches for specific topics, advertisements could be determined by a variety of factors determined and paid for by advertisers, including the location of the point-of-sale device creating the publication.
The patent describes how news organisations “content providers” would end up in a user’s custom magazine:
For example, in one implementation, Newsweek magazine may provide its weekly articles, images, etc. to the custom publication creator, and the custom publication creator may store this information in its content information portion along with previous information obtained from Newsweek. In another implementation, an independent author/journalist or online provider (e.g., a blogger) may provide his/her article(s) to the custom publication creator for storage within the content information portion.
Advertisers, meanwhile, might also be able to target their advertisements to custom magazines relevant to them:
Advertisers may connect to content providers and select specific content and/or demographic, psychographic, and/or behavioral targets they wish to associate with their advertisements. For example, a truck manufacturer may desire to associate their truck advertisements with content relating to trucks (e.g., a truck magazine article). In another example, advertisers may wish to target males having an age of eighteen to thirty-four, who live in Texas, and drink coffee.
Copyright lawyers are probably having palpitations by now. Indeed, the usual opt-in, opt-out argument seems to apply to this idea:
Although FIG. 8 shows the content providers connecting to the custom publication creator to provide content, in another implementation consistent with principles of the invention, the custom publication creator may connect to some or all of the content providers and extract the information from the content providers. For example, if the custom publication creator is granted access to content, it may be able crawl through the content and select content desired to be offered by the custom publication creator. This may be accomplished in a manner similar to the way current news aggregation services operate.
But the patent application also suggests plans for passing on revenue to “content providers”:
Revenue may be paid by the owner of the custom publication creator to the content provider in a variety of ways. For example, in one implementation, the custom publication creator may provide billing, payment, and subscription management online for the content providers, which may avoid the costs and headaches involved in current systems, e.g., manual, paper-intensive, postage-intensive, follow-up for renewals, or other systems currently used by many content providers.
Oh good. This won’t be controversial, then. But perhaps it’s all a little early to get too excited about this. Just because there’s a patent doesn’t mean a product is anywhere near imminent.
Still, this is an interesting intervention in the question of whether the personalised news of the future will take the form of some sort of mobile e-paper device or customised paper product. Dan Blank has some interesting thoughts on that topic.
