Digital Magazines are like self-made Handsfree Phones

What if you are a magazine publisher and you want to do “something” with your magazine online? One of the options is that you publish a so called digital magazine*. To see some examples you can look for Monkey Magazine, or for a little bit more sophistication look at People Magazine, or if you want it really stylish look at the Dutch ElleGirl.  It absolutely looks great: a magazine with sound, moving images, clickable links. But why in a magazine format if you are online?

I can only think of one reason for any publisher to put their magazine online as a digital magazine and that is: people like formats they are used too. Let me give an example:

In the late nineties of the last century the Dutch Teletext pages had one of the highest visitor numbers of all web pages in the country. So here you had a text-based system developed for broadcast television which was being used to find news online. Why? People knew the page numbers by heart, the information was (is) very reliable and the look and feel of the page was known to users.

The same goes for a digital magazine of which you can flip the pages as you are used to do with a magazine. The build up of the magazine is the same (cover, index, small items, cover story, etc etc). All this feels very comfortable and close to what you know.

But in this day and age where people are used to navigate web pages, interact with content, upload their own, it seems odd to put up a magazine on a computer screen. And there are enough examples of how magazines can be online for real. Wired, the German Vogue, actually all Conde Nast titles, Cosmopolitan, French Elle, Hungarian gossip magazine Story are all good examples of magazines taken online and using the functionality of the Web to its best.

Digital magazines remind me of this picture of the self-made hands-free phone: it might work, but it looks ridiculous… 

p.s. with e-paper, digital magazines might become interesting again. In the meantime: read a magazine as it was meant to be: on paper.

*Samir Husni calls them telemags, that has a nice Thunderbirds ring to it