Call me old fashioned but when it comes to digital magazine I’m always a bit sceptical. Maybe it’s that digital magazines somehow miss the point of the printed word, the gratification of some physical—the way it looks, smells and feels in your hands. Or maybe it’s the skin crawling feeling I get thinking that anyone with a DTP program can layout some editorial spread competently. Or maybe it’s why isn’t it embracing online technologies and making the content accessible rather than publishing work using some closed system. What do you think?
Enough of my ramblings. When a press release for CarneMag landed in the submissions box, every alarm was telling me it’s just another digital magazine. But to my surprise it’s actually surprisingly decent content wise. Yes it’s still in a proprietary closed format (looks to be some sort of Flash based solution), weighing in at a ridiculous 65mb and launching in a full screen mode when you open up the app. But once you get past these bug bears, it’s chock full of illustrators, graphic designer and photographers including some familiar names as well as some fresh and exciting work.
This got me thinking though, CarneMag doesn’t really offer much in the form of curation which you’d expect from a magazine. In it’s essence CarneMag is could of been as easily created as a blog and it would of been far more accessible and usable. But there’s something quite alluring about a compiled and edited publication. There’s a real narrative at play here which blogs don’t quite communicate that magazines do so well. At the core of it, with web technologies moving more away from Flash and towards CSS3 and jQuery et al, digital magazines need to embrace it. Sites like Thinking For a Living seem to be going this way. Producing a digital magazine that just works straight in the browser but delivers and considered narrative excites me, a lot.
Food for thought?
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17th Mar 2010
1:31 pm
Some good points. A lot of the arguments for digital publishing spurred by the general OMGtheiPadisgoingtosavetheworld vibe going round at the moment seem to completely overlook that this miraculous “future” of screen-based dynamic content publishing has actually been around for years. It’s called the web. All this e-magazine malarkey seems to be a huge backwards step, no?
daveconrey
17th Mar 2010
8:36 pm
One thing I cannot stand on the web is barriers to entry. I don’t care how pretty the mag is, I will not download a file just to access it. In an age where malware is rampant, this is a flat out stupid solution. No, I will not be reading the meat mag.
Gil
17th Mar 2010
9:27 pm
Completely agree Dave. I’m surprised my subconscious said, hey take the time out to give it a look.
It’s a shame because the narrative aspect of a magazine is what attracts me to them, but digital publishers really need look seriously at delivery systems that make it accessible on a range of devices. After all all that time and content isn’t going to be indexed by Google and unlikely to be shared easily across the plethora of social networks that are rampant.