The current state of Emagazines

[LandSurveyor]

Electronic magazines are the sticking point for me as to whether I stick with a tablet or get a dedicated E-ink machine. Hands down, if I wanted a device just to read books, I'd get something like the Simple Nook with the backlight. Thin & light, simple and portable. And very readable. But limited to 2 colors.

When I got my cheap Touchpad, it came with a Zinio app so I tried that. I hate to say so but I have to call that a fail. It was just a pdf file that required me to pan and zoom endlessly across the screen and the Touchpad seemed close to its limit dealing with it so readable resolution often came slow. Plus, I didn't like the way it's set up. You have to sign in to read your magazines even if they've already been downloaded, which makes them useless if you can't get a connection. It also frustrates me because it's more like I'm renting content rather than owning an issue. I cancelled my subscriptions.

Then someone told me to get the Nook app. There doesn't seem to be one for the Touchpad, no surprise, so I downloaded one for my Android phone. This seems to be better. It has a page mode and an "article mode" that puts readable text on the screen. The downside there is that a lot of the illustrations are missing.

Haven't investigated the Google mags yet but have become curious about them with the advent of the Nexus 7.

Haven't gotten around to Kindle for mags either but at least there's a Touchpad app.

And while I'm at it, I find it surprising that more magazines aren't available in electronic format, since they seem to be having such a hard time in the real paper market.

Is this as good as it gets at the moment or is there something I'm missing?

[questionfear]

You aren't missing anything. The one thing I would say is that it sounds like the Zinio app for the Touchpad was extra crappy. The one for iOS and I believe Android both have article mode so you dont need to pan and zoom.

I don't read a lot of magazines, but I do like to read "Running Times". I found that it was .83 an issue on Amazon (less than $12 a year) and $20 on Zinio. Needless to say I have a subscription to RT on my Kindle app. However, i am a bit different because it's one of those magazines I buy to read on vacation, but at $4-5 for the newsstand version it is cheaper for me to subscribe all year and have the option to read it all year than buy it three times at retail price.

Zinio has a deeper bench of magazines but their prices are slightly higher than Amazon (and possible B&N as well). I know Amazon lets you cancel anytime on subscriptions, I don't know if B&N does and it seemed with Zinio like you paid for a whole year up front. Amazon charges me .83 each month, and I can cancel anytime.

But aside from that someone granular comparison, you didn't miss much. Magazines have struggled a bit making the jump to digital, though if your favorites are on Zinio and you have an Android phone that supports it you might have a better experience than on the touchpad.

[Hook]

I think one of the issues that magazines face that books don't as much (although maybe illustrated books do) is that they probably need to rethink design. They need a new paradigm that actually takes advantage of the medium they are appearing on rather than being like paper magazines. For just type, the analog page metaphor is fine and comfortable for us old geezers, but magazines are as much about layout as content (I used to be a magazine editor, ages ago). They need to stop being ported print versions and actually become designed for tablet reading.

[Mitlov]

Nowadays, magazines are as much advertising as article. "Optimized for tablet reading" includes presenting in a relatively ad-free format. If I was a magazine editor, I wouldn't be scrambling to make a tablet-friendly version of the magazine, regardless of whether it's for Fire, Nook Tablet, iPad, or Nexus 7.

[Hook]

Nowadays, magazines are as much advertising as article. "Optimized for tablet reading" includes presenting in a relatively ad-free format. If I was a magazine editor, I wouldn't be scrambling to make a tablet-friendly version of the magazine, regardless of whether it's for Fire, Nook Tablet, iPad, or Nexus 7.

Except, part of that is because subscription and newsstand sales are so down. The secret of magazine profitability is distribution. If Apple or Kindle can give you millions of potential customers, designing magazines for them is not such a bad idea.

[questionfear]

I wonder how much of it is that no one wants to read a magazine on a 3.5in screen, at least not regularly. So you're mainly looking at the tablet/color ebook reader market, and while those boast impressive numbers in aggregate, only a small percentage of those users are regularly buying magazines.

What the magazine industry needs is a catalyst like ebooks had in the form of the Kindle-they need a 10,000lb gorilla to very suddenly push emags very hard, and then it will all come together. Right now it's all too scattered, and in many ways magazines feel like an afterthought at Amazon and B&N. And Zinio is just not a widely known enough brand to pick up the slack.

[LandSurveyor]

I do think it can be done, however, and done well, on a 7" tablet. Just look at Readers' Digest. Combine that format with hyperlinkex art and photos and the results should be good.

[Mitlov]

This thread prompted me to try out the magazine functionality on my Kindle Fire. Once you buy a magazine, you can read it in either the original print layout (where each screen is one page of the print magazine, including ads, proper layout, etc) or formatted-for-tablet format (which has images inserted into kindle text, with the same configuration for typeface, fontsize, colors, etc that you have when reading a book).

THE GOOD:

Having a table of contents accessible with a single touch of a key is fantastic. I can sometimes spend five minutes trying to find the TOC in an ad-heavy magazine like GQ.

Swapping back and forth between page view and text view is easy. Three taps (open menu, tap toggle, close menu).

Way more convenient than carrying around a paper magazine.

THE BAD:

A 7" screen just isn't big enough to read page view without continually zooming in and panning around the page. It's just not. The Nexus 7 and rumored Fire 2 may mitigate this issue with higher screen resolution, but they don't solve it. Even with sharp text, the letters on a 7" screen are just too small to comfortably read unless you continually zoom in.

Text view loses the page layout that's so critical to magazines. And while it's just fine for a lengthy article, it doesn't know what to do with text-on-images pages in less scholarly/academic magazines.

[LandSurveyor]

It's definitely limited. And I think that a tablet the size of even a medium-sized magazine would be huge and wouldn't sell. Or even if it did, it wouldn't be comfortably portable. I hope somebody finds a creative solution. Magazine subscriptions are falling and a tablet of some sort seems the only reasonable electronic solution.

I was curious about the magazine experience from Kindle on a smartphone but they say it only works on certain Kindle tablets.

I guess having stared at a smartphone screen so much lately, even a small tablet seems like a lot of real estate by comparison.

[Mitlov]

Just discovered a severe problem with Amazon's setup. Unlike books--where once you own it for one device, you own it for all--you have to buy magazines for a particular device. I bought an issue of Details on my Kindle Fire, and when I wanted to try it on a bigger page, I got out my kid's iPad 1...to discover that my "newsstand" is empty in my Kindle app. All my recent book purchases are there, but not the magazine. WTF, Amazon?