It’s been a few years since the success of the iPad started a magazine gold rush among publishers. Today when I go through the magazines in my iPad newsstand, it feels like development of the tablet based magazines by and large seized with the first early experiments. What seemed to be an exiting new platform with loads of possibilities ended with a bunch of enhanced PDF’s, that large publishing houses are pushing out like salami sausage in on a factory line. Personally I was expecting a love story of amazing new experimental storytelling, but ended up with a semi-depressing account of another wasted opportunity by the media industry. Having said that everything is still early days, and there are good options for changing things to the better. We just need to make a few things happen.
The most important is to start focusing on experience rather than just on the distribution. It’s a classic that every time a new medium appears we copy the old way of doing things. Radio was spoken newspaper, television was radio with visuals, and the web has been a lot about distributing existing media formats. The fact that I can download a magazine to my iPad almost anywhere in the world is an awesome improvement in conveniency. But distribution is not enough. When I pay 3-4 dollars to get the tablet magazine I don’t want an experience that is second grade to the printed one. I want something that rivals it, or better even outpaces it. This is far from the case today.
Most of the time what I get for my money is simple a series of flat pages, that I can flip through the same way I do in a printed magazine. Really? If if want the experience of flipping through static pages I would prefer a printed magazine any day. In fact I still love the feeling of paper and glossy images, and for the same reason I buy printed magazines all the time. So I don’t want some dumped down version of that on my tablet. I want stuff I can swipe, tap, magnify and share – just for starters.
To give just a tiny little example: In ebooks you have the feature of being able to tap any word in a text and search it in the build in dictionary, in Wikipedia and on the web – I use this a lot when I come across a phrase or a name that puzzles me. It’s a functionality that is build in to the iOS, so why not use it in iPad magazines? Or why not give me some related media when I’m watching or reading a piece – the Internet is swarming with videos, photos and text that are available through creative commons, so why not find the best ones and pair it with the self-produced content? It would take a minimum of production resource, but give me an experience I could never get in print.
