Eric Schmidt Predicts The Future Of Magazines, Points To ‘Incredibly Immersive’ Tablets

Google CEO Eric Schmidt is predicting the future, and he’s pointing towards magazines and their new home on tablets. Okay, so maybe EVERYONE has predicted that future, but none-the-less, he felt the need to chime in on the subject.

Speaking at a Magazine Publishers Association conference on Wednesday, the Google Chairman told Wired editor-in-chief Scott Dadich that everything is moving to mobile, and magazines will need to fit into that space to survive.

“Tablets are now more popular than PCs,” he said. “You can read it, it knows where you are, it has an accelerometer. There are all sorts of stuff [publishers] can do in tablet magazines [that they] couldn’t do in print magazines.”

Eric Schmidt believes that within five-years “powerful, tablet-looking things — [devices] that look roughly like a tablet — as a substitute for traditional media” will deliver magazine copies and other software based products. Schmidt believes the future of tablets will include an “incredibly immersive” experience that will take advantage of a user’s social graphs, location data, and various other features that help increase interaction.

“It should be very positive for [publishers],” Schmidt added. “In the world of online advertising, the location signal allows you much more targeted ads [than print] ads today … [The more targeted they are], the more likely [readers] are to click, and the more likely advertisers will bid up the price of [ads].”

One area not spoken about was the monetization issue. Google, Facebook, and other large-scale web company’s are currently capitalizing on their incredibly large user bases to gobble up much of the mainstream monetization efforts.

Eric Schmidt says he believes the future is in articles that are not TL:DR, and instead, fit more into an “ADD type of reading.“

Again, that isn’t anything over-the-top or unpredictable, but it’s nice to know that Google shares the vision that is already held by millions of tablet and smartphone customers.

Do you think the future of magazines resides on tablet-type devices?