Digital magazines were an experience in search of a platform - iPad is that platform.
The following was clipped from the blog of Digital Edition provider nxtbook media. In it is a link to my last post on the role the iPad and traditional publishers might play in the development of digital information products that provide a bit of focused yin to the web's (or more accurately the desktop's) inevitable yang of distraction.
Backstory: In the past I have been fairly critical of digital editions of the sort that nxtbook produces. However, my criticisms of the format were never based on the fact that digital editions are focusing, but rather that they were forcing a type of experience into a medium that just did not support it well. In simplified terms digital editions promote a lean back experience in a lean forward environment. DE's also use certain platform technologies that are at odds with the evolving nature of the open web in order to simulate that lean back experience (in case you can't read between the lines I'm talking about Flash).
The one thing that these digital editions had going for them was their focusing aspect and I often wrote that this *could* be the saving grace of the industry. In order to demonstrate that this has been on my mind for some time I give you an excerpt from a post I wrote on December 11, 2007 - The Magazine and the Mobile Web - http://mturro.com/2007/12/11/the-magazine-and-the-mobile-web/
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The mobile web offers up the chance to step away from the small pieces loosely joined and return to something that resembles a unit… an information product. On the world wide web… in a browser… magazines diffuse. Edited information sprawls and becomes part of the information soup… perspective, point of view and editorial voice splinter into bytes. In that world magazines stop making sense. Issues, themes, linear development are washed away by granular expedience and ambient findability. The reader becomes a user, an active participant sitting upright at a desk, studying, searching, learning, reveling in the mode of inquiry the desk space creates.
In the mobile world, pod world… where devices rule… content thrives in packages. Losing yourself in an iPod is like getting lost in a great issue of your favorite magazine. On the iPod we trend away from continuous partial attention and toward something approaching focus. We revert back to listener, we become the reader, relaxed in the mode of contemplation that the mobile world invokes.
It is this focus, this contemplative mode of repose inherent in mobility that affords the magazine its best chance at survival. When we are mobile we are in a mode that print has primed us for… we are relapsing to patterns of behavior that have been cultivated by centuries of ingesting printed media. In the world away from the desk we find a return to form. In that world entrenched media patterns still hold sway. In that world the self-contained media unit, the podcast, the song, the magazine is still vital.
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Who Said it First? Nxtbook or Apple?
Michael Turro has written a very provocative post about long-form content’s place in our digital future. This was a further development of a reference he made to Dave Caolo’s article on unitasking. The curious part is that some writers are now suggesting the walled nature of some Apple apps as an intentional design concept rather than being the oversight they likely are.
It wasn’t too long ago that digital magazine interfaces were looked at the same way. Even though long form reading is often a solitary activity, we’ve long felt the pressure from Turro and others to make the content more open – more open to social media, more open to RSS feeds, more upon to the very things that some are now suggesting are potential distractions.
Read more at www.nxtbookmedia.com
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