The above is a more sophisticated look at what a designed for the web magazine could look like. Several weeks ago I linked to a design concept from Sports Illustrated but this takes things a little further. Things move fast, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a production version(s) like this by the end of 2010 and I (almost) guarantee that you will see at least one major book publisher experiment with a non-fiction title on one of these devices: I do mean 'experiment' and not just slapping the content into epub.
In this video, Jack Schulze explains how they conceived their idea of the digital magazine and at The Guardian, tech editor Bobbie Johnson asks some further questions (Guardian):
What does that mean exactly? Öhrvall explained that the company has done a lot of research to try and understand what it is about magazines that readers enjoy, rather than make certain assumptions about what people do and why."We have done extensive research about consumer behaviour reading print magazines, trying to understand the real drivers behind the emotional attachment people have to magazines... drivers important to translate to a digital world. Furthermore, we have looked into existing digital magazines and analysed why they have failed. We have also done market studies in Japan and South Korea where the use of media in digital media is much more extensive and advanced.This basic research may seem a no-brainer, but it's funny how often the media business relies on self-fulfulling guesses - people often glide over the differences between what customers want and what is convenient for the publisher, often confusing one with the other or amalgamating the two (that's something my colleague Roy Greenslade alluded to in a recent piece).
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Look back over the last century and I think you could argue that the great magazine editors did not follow their audience, they made their audience — and always the secret was provocation. Look at Vanity Fair in the last 30 years. Before Tina Brown: Beautiful, remote, intellectual, elitist, a narrow audience. After Tina Brown: edgy, earthy, intellectual, unexpected. A broad audience. The words to describe why magazines succeed are always the same but the interpretation is what's new. That there are so few bold online magazines is because the designers come out of engineering, in one way or another, not out of magazines. Now, as that's slowly changing, retro seems new. But what will be interesting is to see who can define provocation, not in terms of innovation or iteration but real imagination....
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