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    Electronic magazines

    ...Such as these, here.

    Here's Electronic Beats, as a more specific example.

    So... what do you think of the format? Is it just a gimmick, or might people latch onto these in a way that they might not to conventional websites/webzines. Does the less 'open-ended' format make them more appealing to the people creating them, in a strange way?

    #2
    Electronic magazines

    I produce a lot of these - in a work environment - to supplement printed versions. The problem is that they are quite clumsy to use and can be frustratingly slow. Some providers of the service are better than others but generally I think the format either needs improvement or, oddly, less sophistication. The clever page-turny thing and 3D effect isn't really necessary. I just want to click on something and instantly be on the next page.

    Here's one I did a while ago for The Ashes

    You can see that if you click on the arrows at the top the pages turn almost instantly but the teasing curly edges to the page encourage you to use them and that's when it goes wrong for me.

    It's not on paper so why make it look like it is?

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      #3
      Electronic magazines

      Twilight Johnny Atom wrote:
      It's not on paper so why make it look like it is?
      That's the problem I have with them. Wouldn't the information on them be more 'accessible' (in terms of being easy to read) if it were laid out on a standard web page?

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        #4
        Electronic magazines

        Certainly Issuu could do with losing a load of the rubbish around the page. It would mean the view is bigger so you don't have to zoom in on every single page to read it. Issuu also makes moving around the page once you have zoomed in annoyingly awkward. I think Yudu is a bit better in that respect.

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          #5
          Electronic magazines

          I'm pretty interested in this sort of thing. TJA, do you think about presentation of online content, especially text, differently from how you would for hard copy? Is the text written, or at least chunked, differently when compared with hard copy?

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            #6
            Electronic magazines

            Am I the only one singing this thread title "We'll always be together, together in Electronic Magazineeeeeees!"?

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              #7
              Electronic magazines

              Furtho, all of the electronic versions I produce are just digital versions of printed magazines so the layout is exactly the same. There's not the time or budget to produce different versions for different media.

              If I was designing purely for this format then yes, I would think differently about the presentation and produce something much easier to read on screen.

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                #8
                Electronic magazines

                Yes, TJA's right here.

                The issue here is that you're dealing with two incompatible formats: print and web. I used to do the same thing -- typeset a publication in Quark XPress, send a hi-res PDF to the printer and put a lo-res version on the web. And, of course, the lo-res version was pretty crappy to read on screen and took too long to load; it was only readable if you printed it out.

                If you want a nice magazine layout, you need a designer and a sub-editor. With the web, you're generally relying on a nice CSS template. Maybe the eventual solution is a format and device that's a cross between an iPhone, tablet PC and e-book reader.

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                  #9
                  Electronic magazines

                  evilC wrote:
                  Twilight Johnny Atom wrote:
                  It's not on paper so why make it look like it is?
                  That's the problem I have with them. Wouldn't the information on them be more 'accessible' (in terms of being easy to read) if it were laid out on a standard web page?
                  Until we have high resolution digital paper thingies I agree with you. All the zooming in and out to be able to read it does get in the way. The new Apple mouse might improve things though.

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