It’s Not the File Size That’s Killing iPad Magazines

I think his point is the least of the problems with magazines. In fact, I strongly disagree that fast moving blog-style content is a good thing for magazines. I want to wait for the right mix of browsability and depth, and I want a "periodic" relationship with my periodicals.

I subscribe to a variety of magazines in print and iPad editions. Wired, Mens Health, Economist, Car and Driver, National Geographic, and Popular Photography, to name a few.

I haven't opened a print edition in over a year. That said, I also am not opening these on the iPad, except when stuck on a plane waiting for the flight attendant to finish his seatbelt dance.

Why not?

1. Every time there's an iOS update, the apps forget who I am, and I have to re-register. This usually results in me just ignoring magazines for a quarter or two.

2. They notify of new content, but do not pre-download it. They're huge, 500MB for a magazine, but I have a 64GB iPad -- a lot more memory than patience. When I launch the magazine and see I'll have to wait 5 minutes to download the latest issue, I close it again, and that magazine is lost to me.

3. Some make me scroll around too much. Economist does not. Economist is actually even easier to navigate on the iPad than in print. Of the magazines I do get, GQ is the worst at trying to leverage "new media". I have to paw at the screen 20 times to skim one factoid page, and it's ridiculous. Popular Photography is similar, and I have finished issues only to realize I'd missed entire sections.

4. The pricing model is stupid, and too many magazines don't give a digital subscription along with the print. I can see why most want their print circulation numbers higher -- they're a whole different set of ads and ad pricing. But to have "digital only" subscriptions cost 4x the wholesale print price is ridiculous. Every magazine I mentioned, I buy in print, copy the subscriber ID off the label, and get the digital. I chuck the printed copy or leave it in the company lobby. It's a waste, but when it costs $5/year for print+digital instead of $50 for just digital, I suspect I'm doing exactly what they want. If, however, the publishers that don't have this kind of offer were to let me subscribe digitally for a reasonable price (no more than $1/month since I still have to see the ads and they don't have to handle printing and mailing it), I'd subscribe to a lot more titles.

So, these are the problems, and they're fixable. What he is proposing, however, I disagree with, strongly. Fast moving content is not what magazines are for.

DPReview is a fantastic photo blog, but it's a fundamentally different experience than browsing an issue of Popular Photography. The issue has a theme, a connective binding that ties all its articles together. There's a comfortable familiarity with the voice of the editor. You enjoy a sense of expectation when waiting for the next issue. You go back and revisit a prior month's issue when you're considering a certain kind of gear. These are all very different from the ephemera of the journo-blogs. Each has its place. Blogs replaced the daily newspaper, essentially giving me my Tech section, my Startup News section, instead of whatever my local paper had. But magazines and newspapers coexisted for over a century and it's because they're fundamentally different experiences.

With magazines on the iPad, it's fantastic to travel with 50 magazines at hand, not taking any space. The color images in National Geographic are spectacular, and I don't miss the paper edition. (Mine are all still in their plastic.) The article typography and minimalist layout on Economist is a joy to read.

When done wrong, I can't be bothered to wait for a download, to paw around to find the end of a story, or to pay 5x as much as I would for print.

When done right, I'm convinced these digital editions are the future of periodicals, and blogs are the future of newspapers.

I think he nailed it when he indicated that the Blog has done a great job of replacing magazines.

I used to be a huge newspaper/magazine junkie - I haven't purchased a physical instance in 4+ years. What has replaced it:

  o xkcd
  o wsj.com
  o nyt.com
  o HN
  o daring fireball
  o theverge
  o Yahoo Finance (Stock Portfolio)
  o macrumors/appleinsider/loopinsight
  o asymco

And, somewhat less often:

  o Techcrunch
  o parislemon
  o dpreview
  o pandodaily

And, for some reason, I keep tripping over interesting articles here:

  o http://www.vulture.com/

I won't even get into how TV has been replaced with iTunes, and Radio has been replaced by podcasts (See http://www.macdrifter.com/2012/03/more-on-podcasts-changing-... for a good collection of many of the ones I listen to)

I've _tried_ to purchase these magazines on my Gen1/2/3 iPad - Wired, NatGeo, Economist, various Zino instances (horrible experience), Popular Mechanics - but Colbow has it nailed - you always feel like you are reading a broken PDF, and you are never certain that you've read all the content)

Other than blogs in web format, NYT has recently (finally) started doing a good job of presenting their content in a readable format on the iPad. I still balance it out with the web version, but I find, for long reading, more often sinking back for an hour or so with the Application.

Who knows, maybe we've seen the future of magazines, and it's the blog.

I've pretty much ignored the entire concept of iPad magazines (via Newsstand) until I got my iPad III. Right now I'm trying out the free 7 day trial of The Guardian, and I'm impressed. It's £9.99/month, so I'm still debating if it's worth it, but after 4 days I'm leaning towards yes.

Why? Well, in contradiction of the original article's charges, it does innovate and provide more than just a static page by page experience. You can navigate in a page-by-page sense, but it also groups subjects, provides links to other articles, and has a top level navigation. The front page [https://img.skitch.com/20120321-jg1fn7y9u4ktw7ktx229uygnja.p...] does a great job of highlighting interesting subjects that day, and where an article has a video it can be played inline.

In many ways it's basically a heavily device-oriented website, but it has the advantage that all the content is downloaded automatically each day (without me having to remember to download it whilst on wifi before I head onto the tube). Also, unlike many of the magazines on Newsstand, it actually embeds their gorgeous Guardian Egyptian Text typeface [https://img.skitch.com/20120321-1xb6ybrcyem76rw29569tf9kp5.p...], so even though most of the graphics aren't retina-resolution yet, the text is still beautiful to read.

Contrast this experience with Edge magazine. I've been reading this in print since 1995, and it's always been a high-production quality publication. I'd expect the iPad experience to match, but it doesn't even come close. Apparently one of the oft-mentioned magazines which simply bundles up a bunch of JPEGs, I could probably get past that were it not for the horrible way it loads each page, first apparently using a low-resolution image resized to fit, then gradually drawing in the full-resolution image in tiles [https://img.skitch.com/20120321-kam5qxxn3rens7a1x534jgyidh.p...]. This happens with every single page transition, even with pages you've already visited, meaning that switching between two pages of a gatefold article is an incredibly irritating process. Also, as it's a resized image, the text isn't especially clear, particularly when you compare to the high standard The Guardian sets.

The way I look at it, if old-world print publications want to survive the transition to digital, then they can't expect to get away with the latter, but instead should be striving towards the former. Make a good product and people will buy it. Try and push rubbish and when you finally discover you have to stop the physical presses, the virtual product won't stand up to scrutiny.

I don't think it's about content, it's about usability. I don't want the magazine publisher's 35 different counterintuitive UX innovations all over the artfully designed page with copy too small to read.

I just want to read the content of the magazine without something getting in the way. If the magazine is visual that's fine too, but show pictures or artwork separate from whatever text I'm supposed to read.

Newspapers for IOS suffer from this too. I download a huge app and it works like a website that someone went crazy with animations on.

Blogs are taking market share from magazines b/c lots of what goes into magazines is filler, and blogs don't have the same pressure to publish filler. Consumers of content know the difference and rarely prefer magazine "filler" to decent quality blog posts.

Want to ruin blogs? Give the authors deadlines and tell them what to write about. You'd end up with a magazine.

A thought, iPad magazines would be an excellent place to implement many of Bret Victor's ideas for interactive numerical content, i.e. adjusting variables and seeing how they impact a final result and perhaps seeing that graphed. This seems like a more easily updated model than really unique interactive content in each issue because the artwork can be generic.

The iPad would probably be more usable for this than the web, because it is easier, more natural, and is a more common interaction paradigm to interact with sliders and such on the iPad versus the web. Popovers would also work well here.

It would probably work well for the Economist, which is known for having many great graphs and charts, but I think it would be fun for any news outlet because it isn't gimicky.

Small edits for clarity, popovers.

What I thought could be a step in the right direction was Gilt's partnership with GQ. I envisioned a GQ magazine that was actually interactive, meaning each piece of clothing worn could be tagged with a link to purchase said piece of clothing, or at least get taken to a useful google search about it.

Instead what I saw was more of the same in large corporate partnerships...only one page would be dedicated to the actual items you can purchase. If you clicked on any of the items, you were actually taken to Gilt's Park and Bond store completely outside of the app.

Too bad. i'd really be interested in creating a Magazine using Pinterest, with the business model being links to affiliates.

While what he writes is true, most magazines are not innovating for tablets. Compare Nat Geo with Dwell:

Nat Geo is pretty much an app (I get it through Zinio), the fonts are sized properly for readabilty, and there's a ton of interactive content with hooks into the web for updated content.

Dwell, and just about every other digital magazine, is basically a photocopy. Sure, the images look nice, but the text is unreadable unless you zoom in, and the experience feels wrong. Not to mention they are still pretty pricey.

None of them are searchable, though, which would be an awesome if hooked into spotlight so you could search across all of your magazines.

I have been using Nook and 10.1 Tab for over a year now. It has become a painful experience to carry 'dead-tree' magazines or book. Some vendors just scan and upload copies of their magazines in a poorly designed pdf readers. This diminishes the quality of reading. A dedicated app would be a better idea. It will save bandwidth and provide better experience.

One of the biggest problem with blogging is unlimited availability of space. Blogging does not has to be supported by credible organization. They serve you blog with thousands of ads.

I think that WIRED has done a fantastic job both in terms of their physical copies and digital distribution as well. But even as a techie, the interaction on the iPad just isn't what it should be. I've seen plenty of ads where there's a link you can't click, and other physical representations of digital interactions that are unavailable.

It's 100% about usability, and 5% more about cost.

Seems like ipad magazines are made by people that don't read on the ipad.

Why can't they be more like instapaper & flipboard ?

I have subscriptions to Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and Wired. All three are pretty good and I have few complaints. I believe I paid $15 for 1 year for each one. Barely more than $1 an issue which is quite reasonable.

i was very excited about the ipad magazines and subscribed to a couple. at the time, the way that they were downloaded prevented me from ever actually getting them.

i had to load up the PopSci app, tell it to download, and then just sit there and wait (for hours, on my shitty wifi connection). if the connection died or the ipad went to sleep it had to start again.

i bought 3 annual subscriptions and have never actually been able to read any of them.

TRVL is the best iPad magazine. Lots of more interesting content, some attempts at interactivity ... and it's free.