Magazines Go Digital, Almost Unusable
August 5, 2009
At lunch today, one of the goslings mentioned a Lifehacker post about MagMe.com. We fired up the Dell Mini 9, our lunch companion and took a look. On the Dell Mini’s screen, there was not much that was legible. The wireless connection provided by the restaurant bogged down with job seekers surfing Craigslist.com for a lead made the interface slow, very slow. You can try the service once you register. A couple of the fields on the registration screen did not work too well; for example, the city field popped the cursor to the last name field. Magazines are in a world of hurt because their business model seems out of sync with what is happening online. MagMe.com may be one way to save a once vital information sector. You can check out a competitor called Magazines.net. Slightly different approach but clunky. At least Magazines.net has a search engine. Judging from the line up of magazines on these two services, you have an eclectic range of titles to browse. Not for me and my Dell Mini 9.
Stephen Arnold, August 5, 2009
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One Response to “Magazines Go Digital, Almost Unusable”
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I’m not surprised at the experience you had with these online “digital magazines.” Every publisher I’ve seen seems to think that readers are going to be satisfied with gratuitous flash-based page turning effects even though the renditions of the printed page either have type too small to be readable (when viewing a complete page, or even worse, two facing pages) or if they even have a zoom capability that lets you read the text, forces you to drag the page hither and yon as you attempt to read a two- or three-column layout intended for a physical piece of paper.
What *none* of them seem to ‘get’ is that online is a different medium, and no online “digital magazine” is going to work for the reader unless it can be read simply using standard browser (or perhaps PDF, although that has its own problems) rendering.
The easy solution is something nobody has tried. Pick up a standard format trade magazine; now rotate it 90 degrees. pretend that the staples are on the left, and that the magazine is now in landscape mode, not portrait mode. This aspect ratio is perfect for rendering online. Look at your PC’s monitor: it’s not in portrait mode (taller than it is wide), it’s in landscape mode (wider than it is tall). If publishers simply *printed” on paper in landscape mode they’d be able to have a faithful rendition of their printed magazine on the computer screen without having to resort to all kinds of specialized plugins/downloads that have human factors/usability professionals up in arms.
But until publishers realize that they aren’t primarily *print* media, but are in the business of creating an engaging reading experience online (print numbers will continue to decline, some publishers are now requiring payment to receive a printed copy of formerly free controlled circulation trade magazines), they are all going to miss the boat.