A Kindle for Magazines?

Whatever the future of magazines looks like, there's a pretty good chance that an e-reader along the lines of Amazon's Kindle, but with a bigger, more sophisticated display, plays some part in it. It looks like the first ones will be produced by Hearst Corp.

According to Fortune, Hearst has been developing a device it plans to unveil later this year. It will bear a resemblance to the Kindle in several regards: The display will use energy-efficient e-ink, and content will be downloaded via a wireless connection. Unfortunately, like the Kindle, the first version will also have a black-and-white display -- almost certainly limiting it to a curiosity for hardcore gadget geeks. But color displays capable of video are being tested, and even the first-generation devices will boast a large screen approximating the size of a standard magazine page.

A 122-year-old company, Hearst has been engaging in some fairly forward thinking of late. This week alone, the company hired a Yahoo executive, Neeraj Khemlani, to spearhead its digital content operations; unveiled plans to introduce citizen journalism to its newspapers through a partnership with Helium; and explored the possibility of adding pay-per-view sections to the website of the San Francisco Chronicle (assuming that paper survives).

Comments

[Honey:]

I, for one, am not going to sit at a computer and read the news as such. I really can't believe that the newspapers and magazines are not going to be available to have when relaxing in a chair.

Feb 28 04:52 PM

[Automotive_...:]

There already is a full-color Kindle out there for magazines, it's called a PC notebook or MacBook. The real problem is that when traditional vertically-oriented magazine content is presented on a rectangular laptop screen, one must roll, scroll, and zoom the text. It's not a magazine-like reading environment.

I edit and publish an online-only magazine, Automotive Traveler (automotivetraveler.co... so I speak with some experience on the issue of digital magazines. When a magazine is built from the ground up to be presented digitally, you can optimize the presentation in many ways. It requires an entirely different way of thinking about magazine design and layout; instead of two pages making up the "spread" in the traditional sense we design our page to fit a wide variety of computer screens. As the world goes from a traditional 4x3 format to a 16x9 screen as the industry standard, things are easier, from the standpoint of design.

When I sat down with my designers two and a half years ago when we first thought about our layout template, we made some very calculated decisions about things like font selection for instance. I use a compact, 4-pound laptop with a 13.1-inch widescreen for all of my editing but we've tested our layout with displays from a 9-inch Sony laptop all the way up to a 60-inch plasma flat panel, which can be easily read from 10 feet away from the Lazy Boy in your home theater.

Skeptical? Try it for yourself, select and load a conventional magazine that has been re-purposed for the web; there's hundreds out there from a number of publishers on a variety of platforms. Here's a link to one that can be viewed for free. (tinyurl.com/MuE-HP - I use this one because it is both representative of a traditional magazine ported digitally as well as the fact that I contribute to it) Then load Automotive Traveler (automotivetraveler.co... and ignoring the subject content for just a moment, compare how easy it is to read, follow and navigate in each environment. I’m confident that you will immediately see a difference, no matter what the size of your display. To further optimize the presentation of Automotive Traveler, hit “f11” to go into a full-screen mode in your browser and watch what happens to the size of the “page” as it automatically resizes itself to optimize for your monitor and screen resolution.

Just because magazines have always had vertical page orientation doesn't mean that they will in the future. That was the first convention we threw out the window, not being shackled by having to work off the vertically-oriented script. We knew that there was little chance, in this business publishing environment even two years ago, that we would try the even more expensive route of a print companion, no matter how much we would have liked to go that route. And in reality, with all the interactivity we’ve built into our digital presentation, I truly believe that a paper version of what we’ve done would pale in comparison. (Of course, if you want a hard copy, you can always print out specific pages. I will not go into how much greener Automotive Traveler is than a conventional magazine, and how we by-pass all the current problems with distribution of magazines to news stands.)

We are a tiny publisher serving a very specialized niche. But there is no reason why a larger, forward-thinking publisher can't do what we do. But I will tell you that while we work with a great supplier, our IT team at Automotive Traveler has integrated several enhancements "under the hood" to fully optimize our presentation. This is the value-added package that we bring to the game. Do we have all the answers? Of course we don’t. Building a sustainable business model based on advertising is one piece of the puzzle that has still eluded us. But we know that if the content is presented on the web, people expect it for free; it’s just that simple.

What these readers don’t understand is that while we have eliminated paper, printing, and postage, we still have contributors that we pay for their content, editors, and designers, to name a few, that are required to put together Automotive Traveler. Then there’s servers, bandwidth, hosting fees, and a guy sitting in Houston (I’m in California with the Managing Editor and one designer, another designer is in Germany, and our offices are in Scottsdale so we can truly be called a virtual printing company.) who makes all of it work, including our companion website (automotivetraveler.co...

Sorry this is turned out so long but as you can tell, I’m just a bit passionate about this subject and hope that if you have any comments or questions that you’ll post them here or contact me direct. I’ve bookmarked this page and will check back here often. Until then I hope you will check out Automotive Traveler and check out our practical vision for digital publishing that requires no specialized device, just the laptop you’re currently using and see if we don’t have the most magazine-like reading experience (clicking on either corner of the page flips it forwards or backwards). The vision we had, from the start was to combine elements of a great travel magazine with an equally great automotive magazine. Maybe you can tell us if we’re meeting that goal?

Thanks for reading.

Richard Truesdell
Founder and Editorial Director, Automotive Traveler

Mar 04 12:43 PM