idio Platform

In a recent post about publishing being about artefacts and access, I suggested that magazines were living in false hope regarding the iPad. Many of the apps we have seen (and we have played with a lot: see our Top iPad Applications for Magazines series), are focused on creating very visually-interesting artefacts, rather than delivering access to the wealth of content and community available on the open web.

The problem is that although people might pay to see the first few issues of one of these products, I am yet to be convinced that people will pay time and time again for a digital product that they can access in a simpler form by just using their iPad’s browser. These products are consumable but not tangible. There is little “collect and keep” value.

“They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.” – Vinh

“Interactivity”

Most of these apps boast of “interactivity”, and in terms of the basic definition, they deliver. But every digital medium provides an experience where the interaction between the machine and the human is involved in shaping the content delivery. In today’s world, interaction means the ability to talk back, slice off, share, add to, mash up.

When I swipe and image and it spins to give a 3D view, its cool. When I hover over an image thumbnail and it starts playing as a video, its pretty much expected. When an infographic changes based on my selections, its useful. But if I want to bookmark a certain useful piece of content, or share it with my friends, I hit the brick wall. It is a static and separate piece of content, not dynamic and shareable like most digital content.

When coming to write this post I had a search around and found several others saying the same. As Vinh, the ex-Design Director for the NYT describes the New Yorker app: “I couldn’t email, blog, tweet or quote from the app, to say nothing of linking away to other sources — for magazine apps like these, the world outside is just a rumor to be denied.”

At the end of 2010 are we really at a point where a publisher thinks they can deliver a definitive viewpoint, without linking to external sources for further reading? Or where we can deliver static broadcast material to everyone, without allowing any peer-to-peer connections to emerge in the community of readers?

Heavy

The second issue I have is that they are pretty bloated and therefore slow to download. This seems to be partly because of a very cumbersome system that Adobe is using in conjunction with publishers, and partly because many of the pages are designed using the print workflow, and carry that design weight onto the iPad even if it isn’t used. This post has a more in-depth look, but basically there is no HTML in these apps, just a large series of huge images to make up every page and animation!

This leads to some apps taking hours to download over anything but a fast wifi connection. The Wired app is 500 megabytes! It’s almost more cumbersome than carrying the print mag everywhere with you…

“my gut feeling is that there is a massive opportunity to reinvent the concept of a magazine – yet we end up with something akin to what the web was like in the mid to late 90′s” – Interface Labs

Anyone remember magazines on CD-ROMs…

It’s a while back, but some of these apps really do seem similar to the range of publications that were available on CD-ROM back in the 90s: lots of video and audio to spice up the text content; a linear reading process; no awareness of the context of the web or links out; a large file size.

The digital publishing world has fundamentally changed, and it seems odd to still be publishing digital products that are so separate from all of a reader’s other content consumption and experience. Although there are some very poor “augmented digital-replicas” around as iPad apps, other publishers are doing some great work. Recently I’ve used Gourmet Live and Knot Magazine and both allow much more relevant forms of interaction. And of course, Flipboard is probably the most visible example of effectively mixing a great, glossy interface with dynamic and user-selected content.

I love the first play with most magazine apps; a lot of money has been spent on making them look and feel awesome. But when I can take an iPad everywhere  - from the boardroom to the bathroom – it seems incongruous that I can’t share content immediately with the person sitting next to me. And these interactions are now a vital part of my content consumption.