PopSci publisher demos tablet-friendly magazines
updated 11:20 am EST, Thu December 17, 2009
Mag Plus concept made for touch, sharing
Popular Science publisher Bonnier and the design group Berg today showed Mag+, a new magazine concept designed for an expected wave of tablets from Apple and others (video below). The approach would take advantage of both a touchscreen and an Internet connection to provide a more modern experience: articles would be continuous scrolls rather than pages and would need only a swipe to one side to change articles entirely.
It would support much more visual searching of articles with an on-screen keyboard and would have a gesture-based system for copying text as well as sharing through services like Facebook or Twitter. As the layout is a prototype not based on any specific hardware, it's likely to see some changes if it reaches the finished stage depending on the target hardware and the particular magazines.
The Berg approach follows just after Condé Nast and Time Inc. have demonstrated their own concepts for tablet-ready publications as these and other publishers expect a major shift away from print towards enhanced forms of reading, whether on tablets, smartphones or traditional computers.
Fresh-Faced Recruit
Joined: Aug 2001
Cart before the horse?
Eiher the magazine industry knows something we don't, or they're letting their "big idea" guys have too much free time. They're already designing for hardware interface options that doesn't exist? Curiouser and curiouser...