http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/04/skiff-reader-is-largest-reader-yet-will-be-hitting-a-sprint-sto/

I have to wonder at the relative success of such devices, though this is promising technology. Publications are largely advertising funded, and not subscription funded. WiFi or 3G delivery might reduce costs, but will there be enough users to justify the ad rates, or will those fall lower than internet ad rates?

AMEN BROTHER!

Best,
Ken

The notion that some magic machine is going to bring back the traditional magazine is an illusion. The product is no longer needed.

The future lies in rethinking the reading experience. We call it webpages and bookmarks for a reason you see. It’s all in relation to printed media. I can scroll with my hands in a 500 year old book. It hasn’t changed. But it’s going to.

We will see a collapsed media flow, where channels integrate into each other. I won’t read “a magazine”, not on paper and not on a tricoder. I will dip my fingers into the media flow and find the information that is relevant to me. And I won’t look at any ads.

Great job Rob.

Will Steacy has an interesting take on this on his blog (http://bit.ly/7RDFwN). He leans more to David Harry Stewart’s point about the dominance of the moving image. And he makes a compelling argument.

In a perfect world, I think you’d be right Rob, but I do fear that storytelling, from journalism to feature stories in magazines, will look more like this piece from VII’s Christopher Morris (http://bit.ly/8DpQ2u) in the future.

It just seems that everyone is adopting video. It’s in our still cameras and it’s being adopted by almost every content provider.

Best, Reini

On-demand printing could work for my “archiving” purposes, and would be a great option anyway, in case I’d just like to have a print version of a single issue.

But it would be really great if the service would let me keep and electronic archive of what I paid for anyway; in addition to letting me order an on-demand dead tree version.

Magazines don’t force you to return or destroy the dead tree issues now. It would be unfortunate if they could force you to delete older issues as new ones come out on devices like these.

Amen to that!

Leaf Capture for me, currently, but wouldn’t it make a great location tether solution! Add an HDMI port for use as an external monitor (for filmmaking…) and we’d really be talking!

I’d like to be able to tether to Capture One with an iPad. If I could do that I’d never own another laptop. :D

Both horizontal an vertical is a great idea — double trucks without gutters and no annoying up & down scrolling to read two column text.

CSS3 and HTML5 is a good idea but you can be sure the MicroSoft and Apple will have their own competing Magazine OSs — not to mention the Open Source readers that will pop-up. Looks like Browser Wars The Sequel is on the horizon.

Videos don’t belong in magazines, but a link to their web site video would be good. I say this as some-one who has just waited 15 min for the Mag+ video to down-load to my laptop. BTW I’m using Verizon’s 3G net — about as good as it gets. If sometime in the future they come up with a way to instantly load video into a wireless device then video would be great (I come from a motion background, not print).

I find the whole development of new communication streams to evolve the publishing industry fascinating, and actually quite exciting for the possibilities.

Whilst I really like their thinking on the user experience and interface, I would personally, as a consumer, prefer this to be an full application (rather than iPhone App) available on the Apple iPad (or whatever it turns out to be), that I could then subscribe to, to access the ‘magazines’ rather than a proprietary piece of hardware. That way i could potentially access multiple publishers stables of publications, whilst only having to carry one main device.

I should say I’d like to see the iPad (?) have the majority of the functionality of a laptop, though, so it could become the main portable device away from the desk, rather than just a media reader/streamer/big iPod, leaving the need for a laptop as well. Similar to what John was saying above.

Exciting time of flux.

Cheers

Matt

I like the idea, the promise, but I see ourselves trading one finite resource for another, wood for rare earth metals. The toxicity of recycling computers really needs to be a priority, otherwise this mag reader is just another cell phone, billions of which are ending up in landfill or being “recycled” in a non-friendly manner.

we can grow more trees, we can’t make more lithium. maybe we can grow fireflies who like to sit side by side in tiny tiny rows and glow to our demands!

also, I think we like our industrial designers to have english accents! (Ive, Dyson)

Additionally, I think it’s a recipe for disaster for magazines and newspaper to go up against television. You can’t compete on that level without destroying your core competencies. It think there’s room for it all without convergence.

Of course i still want one.

Thanks for putting this piece up. I love the platform, and from what I hear in my meetings, it is the way all the big magazine people are going. Interesting how BERG is imagining putting stills on what is a fully motion capable platform. I don’t get it. Why would someone do that? Here and there, yes. Stills are great. But to think that the entire magazine would be stills? No way. That is not what I am seeing. Call me a radical, but the days of the stills only shoot are almost over. Check out Nick Nights comments in the latest Aperature, which I fully agree with. There is nothing that I see anywhere in any image generation technology or image consuming technology that is in any way remotely positive for stills. There will always be photographers, just like there will always be illustrators. If I were about to go off to college today, I would be studying motion image technology, not stills.

Best wishes,

David

The other thing that’s important initially is that it’s easy to port a magazine to this device. This one seems dead simple in the layout department. If they can import InDesign documents it will save publishers 100′s of thousands in converting for a device.

However, one of my concerns is the longevity of data. I subscribe to a lot of magazines, and while I don’t necessarily keep every single copy permanently, I like to have them around for a while. And some do find their way to my bookshelves, where they may be kept permanently.

A great feature for this service would be a “digital bookshelf” where you can keep all of your old magazines and review them; even if you no longer subscribe to that particular mag.

One thing these guys really seem to understand is that while look-and-feel may vary magazine-to-magazine, the navigation should be identical. This becomes even more important if these guys wind up using that format to set the standard for all the readers.

The price point will be very interesting. I think paper and fulfillment are the two biggest expenses in magazine publishing, and if they can kill off print altogether, or greatly reduce volume, I wonder what cover price and sub price will look like on this device?

I suppose it’s too much to hope for that with lowered costs, the publishers will pay more to the writers, designers, editors and photographers…

I like the big pictures, though. Will everyone just shoot horizontal now and rely on a p.e. to crop to vert for the “covers”?