So I got me an iPad. In a future post I’ll review it thoroughly, but first (I suspect like many other of the initial one million iPad owners) I need to discover more precisely how it fits into my life, what computational tasks I can effectively offload to it, what uses it’s really capable of and appropriate for. Of the canonical uses Apple has proposed for the iPad – web surfing, media, games, etc – I’ve been pleasantly unsurprised to see that it handles most quite well. I was quite surprised, however, to see altogether missing from the iPad and its ecosystem at launch an inbuilt platform for magazines and other periodicals akin to that provided for books via iBooks. I think it would be a perfect fit for the large-scale digital distribution of periodicals, surely on the horizon in one form or another, particularly for traditional glossy magazines in a way that e-ink based e-readers are not. In all likelihood, Apple was avoiding biting off more than it could chew with a first gen product launch, but I’m happy to see that several publishers have wasted no time in taking a stab at it themselves.

At one point I had about $150 per year in subscriptions – science & tech industry journals + lots of mainstream stuff like Scientific American, Popular Science, Time, Wired, etc. I have precisely one physical (as in dead tree) subscription now – Time…and only that because it was given to me as a gift and I’ve been kept just interested enough to neglect to cancel it. I graduated and got busy, but also I got tired of hauling all of that paper around which I couldn’t search (like the web), which was fundamentally unlinked & static, and which fell out of date if I didn’t read it quickly enough. The state of the publishing industry seems to indicate that I’m not the only one who’s reading fewer magazines these days, but I’ve always liked the format. There are aspects of a magazine in the realms of informational layout, graphic design, and portability which have not to date been replicated (well) on the web or in any other electronic form. Not that publishers haven’t tried, as attested to by a digital publishing landscape littered with past failures (remember the bright future of CD-ROMs?). Over the past few years the tech necessary to at least attempt digital magazines has finally come to pass – primarily portable devices with strong graphics capabilities and wireless networking ubiquity at reasonable speeds from the mobile phone carriers and WiFi zones. E-readers like the Kindle have tried to position themselves for magazines, but couldn’t pull it off like they did with newspapers because e-ink blows for anything other than static black and white content. Smartphones almost got us there, but are ultimately (and necessarily) just too small for the purpose, both in screen real-estate and battery capacity. So it’s not surprising that publishers were keenly interested in what Apple might announce in a tablet form factor…interested enough even to hold their plans in the design phase until they found out. Many have now gone gaga over the iPad, but one in particular has caught my eye.

I had heard before the iPad about digital magazine initiatives from Condé Nast and seen the Sports Illustrated mockup that went viral a few months ago (www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntyXvLnxyXk, developed by Time, Inc in conjunction with an NYC design firm called The Wonder Factory), but the system I’ve found really interesting on my iPad is that which Popular Science (and SciAm, and Wired, among others) have attached themselves to – a more mature effort from the European firm Bonnier R&D and London design consultancy BERG. Theirs is the first vision of digital magazines I’ve seen which seems to have real UI design substance behind it. And they are also first to market, because you can get the April and May issues of Popular Science embedded in their architecture on the iPad right now. I have…and it’s pretty damn cool!

See their general concept, Mag+, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAZCr6canvw

And here’s a demo of the specific Popular Science+ version which is the first they’ve deployed to the iPad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjePuSCy21E

It really does work like they show in the design mockup (minus a few features they haven’t had time to implement yet), which I think is both a testament to the practicality of the design and the capabilities of the iPad. BERG and Popular Science have done something right, because PopSci+ costs $5 per issue in the app store (same as the print edition’s newsstand price), which is surely more than publishers are going to be able to charge for digital magazines once things really get rolling, and yet they’re rumored to have sold 150,000+ copies of the April issue alone thus far.

Perhaps I’ll return to the “curated” experience of reading magazines again in the future once the novelty wears off and digital pricing models become sane, rather than just reading the magazines’ websites. I’m sure the potential market will grow rapidly as more iPads and other tablet form-factor devices are sold. As for the iPad itself, it’s going to have a big impact on mobile computing. It’s been a long time since I’ve had this much fun with a computing device! More on that next post…