If you are a fan of fashion, this is huge news. If you're not, it's huge news. History is more than big decisions made by bigwigs in big buildings. It's how we think, eat, buy, sing, move and dress. Vogue is, for better or worse, a prominent lens onto a substantial segment of our cultural mores. Not to mention, it helps to bring history alive when you can picture the details. Now there will be an archive of the sartorial side of those details.

"According to a reliable source, we've learned that this mysterious web property will be a digital archive. That means every single issue since the fashion bible launched in the 1890's will be available online."

We sent Vogue questions about the site, the archive and whether access will be free or paid, but they remained unanswered at the time of posting. If we receive a response, we will update.

Google has discussed its plans with a number of publishers, including Time Warner, Condé Nast and Hearst Corp, but according to the story, the details and timing are "vague." And it's possible that the venture won't materialize.

Wooing Publishers to Android with Better Consumer Data

Google has apparently told publishers that it would take a smaller cut from its Android apps than the 30% that Apple takes from iTunes sales. And to sweeten the deal, Google has also proposed giving publishers access to personal data about app consumers.

The latter has been a sticking point for the publishing industry, which has grumbled about Apple's refusal to hand over download data, arguing that it needs this sort of information to better serve readers (and advertisers).

For example, Jay Lauf, the publisher of The Atlantic recently wrote, "What happens if an "iStand" supplants the newsstand in the way iTunes has supplanted the record store and it supplants our traditional means of driving subscriptions? Currently it means the characteristics and locations of readers we've long had a direct relationship with, whom we know so much about--which allows us to provide them better content and more meaningful ways to engage while also allowing us to better service our advertisers--will be in the hands of Apple, not us."

For its part, Apple is preparing to make changes to iTunes in order to meet some of publishers' wishes, including adding subscriptions and sharing more user data. However, the latter will be "opt in" - subscribers can choose to share their personal information with the publisher. Or not. According to The Wall Street Journal, "some publishers remain unhappy with this arrangement because they think few customers would opt to share such data" - something that perhaps speaks volumes about the "relationship" that many readers have with magazines these days.

Photo credits: Flickr user Des Byrne

We'll analyze a standalone iPad magazine app (Wired) and a service that offers access to many different magazines (Zinio).

Wired

Wired magazine has been the most high profile magazine to utilize the iPad's interactivity. Each new edition costs US$4.99 and is a fairly bulky download - the most recent 'Web is dead' edition was 482MB. But it is packed with interactive goodies.

The iPad version of Wired features videos, touchscreen infographics, slideshows, music and more. For example, a story about a small American town called Picher that has been "devastated" by lead and zinc mining, is accompanied by a video featuring Picher locals talking about the impact of mining on their town. It augments the story nicely and brings the reader closer to the issue.

There are some oddities to the Wired app, however. For example, you can't do the usual pinching motion to enlarge text that is present in most other iPad apps. So if the font type is too small for you to read, you're out of luck. The blog iA has a thorough critique of this and other issues. Also see our own Sarah Perez's thoughts on the sometimes confusing features of various iPad magazines.

But overall, Wired's app is the best example currently of a mainstream magazine utilizing the iPad's touchscreen and interactive capabilities. Below are two examples of the touchscreen functionality: on the left, the user scrolls with their finger to see a history of dogs; on the right, the user swipes their finger to see a graphical illustration of 'spin.'

Zinio: Multiple Magazines

Online magazine shops like Zinio offer up multiple magazines for purchase. Zinio aims to duplicate the print magazine reading experience in digital format. This description of itself on Google sums up what Zinio aims to deliver: "Same content. Same design. Delivered over the Internet."

Reading many of Zinio magazines on iPad is pretty similar to reading PDF files on iPad - there is little in the way of interactivity other than clicking the odd hyperlink and zooming in and out of articles. Some of Zinio's offerings have interactive features, but not the ones I've subscribed to.

So far I've purchased subscriptions to an art magazine called Juxtapoz, popular music magazine Rolling Stone, and a lifestyle magazine called The FADER. The main benefits to me are speed of delivery and lower cost. I've appreciated getting the latest editions as soon as they come out and not having to pay the premium that international magazine readers pay for print versions.

The reading experience leaves something to be desired, mostly because the text is generally too small to be read on an iPad without zooming in and out constantly. One zooms in to read an article, then zooms back out again to flip to the next page or navigate to another section. So there is more pinching and other finger movements than ideal.

Although I still read iPad magazines the same way as print magazines - sprawled on my sofa or bed - there are differences in the reading experience. For example, with the Juxtapoz print edition I used to flick through the magazine randomly admiring the artwork. Often I'd start reading whatever article happened to fall open in my lap. With the iPad edition, it's harder to randomly flip through pages and so you lose some of the serendipity of casually flicking through a magazine.

One benefit of the iPad edition of Juxtapoz is that you can zoom in and inspect art works close up - although given that it's essentially a PDF, the resolution is not ideal.

I still prefer print magazines from a user experience perspective, although I like the experimentation of Wired and others. However, overall I prefer iPad magazines due to speed of delivery, cheaper price and ability to access a whole archive from one app.

How Can Magazines Improve User Experience?

Wired's use of touchscreen functionality and interactivity is a start. But it feels a little too much like a self-contained app, with not enough tentacles reaching outside. No wonder they declared the Web to be dead. How about some commenting and rating features? Or links to Twitter and Facebook?

Also iPad magazines should take a leaf out of eBooks and provide features like highlighting, notes, word look-up, and search. When I am reading an article in Rolling Stone, I sometimes come across a pithy quote from a musician that I like - so it'd be great to have a way to highlight and share that.

If you're an iPad owner, what do you think about magazines on the device? Or if you don't have an iPad, let us know your thoughts on digital magazines in general. What features would you like to see?

Image credit: HAMACHI!

Similarly, the blog Mobile Entertainment reported today the The Financial Times, a London-based newspaper, has sold 130,000 copies of its iPad in the first two weeks. This figure is already more than one-third of the 350,000 iPhone apps the Times has sold since its launch nearly a year ago in July of 2009. The other surprising fact is that the Financial Times' iPad app has only been on sale in the U.S. and has yet to launch in the U.K. where the paper is published.

Is this a clear sign that the iPad has changed the way people think about reading on a mobile device? Is the smaller size of the iPhone screen to blame for poorer sales compared to the iPad? Or is it that iPad novelty has yet to wear off? According to Mobile Entertainment, The Financial Times' Stephen Pinches estimated that 2010 would be the first year the publication makes more from content than from advertising - a startling revelation in the publishing industry.

Publishers that are looking to get in on the action will soon have the process of app creation simplified with new software from Adobe. CNET blog Deep Tech reported today that Adobe plans to make available software that allows publishers to quickly and easily lay out interactive media for the iPad. Working in tandem with the newly released CS5 version of InDesign, publishers can produce interactive multimedia apps using Adobe's forthcoming software - the same used to create Wired's popular iPad app.

Clearly the iPad is providing a temporary boost to publishers' sales, but the question remains, will it last? The iPad is still very new and many of these sales can be attributed to the exploratory app hunting many new owners of the device are prone to. Wired and The Financial Times are also a pair of publications that may be suited to selling better on the iPad than others. Fans of geekery and technology, as well as wealthy Wall Street investors - two demographics likely to read the publications - are more likely to own the iPad both because of its price and its status as an early-adopter geek toy.

Whether other publications can attain similar results on the iPad has yet to be seen, but it seems clear that many will soon be trying thanks to the iPad's successful sales. In the first two months, Apple sold 2 million iPads, and those are numbers publishers likely can't resist. Hopefully with Adobe's software - or other software, for that matter - publishers will have the ability to make apps at the caliber and with the same sales figures as the early successes from Wired and The Financial Times.

Note: Paperboy isn't available in the U.S. version of Apple's App Store. In the U.S., only Kooaba's app for recognizing books, DVD covers and other physical objects is currently available. Kooaba also worked with Wired last year to make some of the magazine's advertisements more interactive.

Kooaba, which specializes in image recognition and already offers similar recognition tools for book and CDs, is working directly with a number of magazine publishers in the German-speaking world. The company plans to bring its services to other countries as well. Sadly, the service doesn't work for papers and magazines that don't work directly with Kooaba to get their content featured on the app. Kooaba needs a PDF version of the magazine to train the service's image recognition software.

Besides making the article available for online reading and sharing, Paperboy's partners can also include links to their Facebook and Twitter profiles, as well as links to related articles and videos.

Magazines and papers can also choose to charge their users for accessing extra content through Paperboy. In addition, advertisers can embed related links to their web sites whenever somebody scans a relevant article or print ad.

Overall, this looks like an interesting concept. Even though the newspaper and magazine business is in the middle of a deep crisis, print won't go away for a while and applications like Paperboy can help print publishers to bridge the gap between their traditional publications and their online presence. The question, however, is if other technologies like QR codes aren't easier to use for publishers who just want to embed a link into an article for example.

Via: Netzwertig

First up: the heavily praised interactive VIV mag, a standout among online newstand Zinio's offerings. Early demos were decidedly exciting. This wasn't text - it was a multimedia experience! The article featured in the demo video, a sex-ed advice guide, used actors against a green screen to produce a mini-movie illustrating the article's main points. Worried about AIDS? A women writhes against a bull's-eye as knives fly at her. Afraid of pregnancy? A women casts a worried glance at the man entering the room while pressing her hand to her stomach.

In practice, however, this format is not as much fun as expected. The cover features clickable links, one that reads "Enter Issue" and another that says "Click to VIVIFY this cover!" Sorry - what? Now I know that they mean "launch interactive content" but mainstream Dicks and Janes may not. And the iPad, if anything, is targeting these so-called "everyday" users - the content consumers whose tech-savviness is a bit lacking, if I may say so kindly. But if you don't "vivify" the mag, you miss the movies - the main attraction. (There is a "Vivify" button at the bottom of each page, too, in case you didn't see it the first time around, but the text next to it says "Tap on the 'V' to read more." Read? How about "watch" or "see?")

Another problem with VIV? I'm not sure if it was an app glitch or an iPad one, but the first movie got stuck "downloading" at 16%. Future, here I come?

Next is TIME magazine. A gushing editor's letter talks about the publication's embracing the new slate-computer platform of the iPad. But how they've done so is already attracting some criticism. One of the problems is that TIME decided to go with vertical swipes for reading articles but horizontal swipes for navigating from one article to the next. This is not intuitive. On an eReader, whether book or magazine, we expect to read left to right. Vertical only works on the desktop-based web.

Condé Nast's GQ magazine is another specialized iPad creation I examined. It doesn't start off well: upon launch, a progress bar displays how much of the magazine has download so far. Will the mainstream user know that you don't have to wait for the download to complete before you tap "read issue?" I'm so not sure. They've also chosen to go with vertical navigation for reading articles and horizontal navigation for scrolling between sections.

Meanwhile, Car & Driver's "iPad Interactive Edition" returns you to plain ol' horizontal flipping. In fact, the magazine looks so much like a color PDF that we almost missed the interactive features. Obviously, two white squares overlaid on an image surely means "launch photo gallery," right?

One app that gets it right is NPR....although that's probably because it's not really trying to be a magazine, despite the company's claims that it uses a "magazine-style presentation." While it's true that you can flip from page to page, horizontally of course, the app is more than a mere digitized mag. There's an audio player, playlist creator, program and station finder and more. The news items with an audio track feature buttons for listening and adding to your playlist. Straight text-based items do not. Simple and easy, and overall, well-done.

At the end of the day, these magazines are still more fun than their analog counterparts, but, clearly, they're all in very experimental stages right now. The navigation and interactive features differ from magazine app to magazine app, with some getting it better than others. Will they eventually standardize their presentation in an effort to simplify their features? Should they? It's too early to tell what format readers will prefer: mini-movies, some interactive bits sprinkled throughout or straight-laced e-reading. In the meantime, it will be interesting to try out all the variations.

VIVmag received quite a bit of press - almost as much as Wired did for their so-called "iPad app." But Wired's app isn't iPad-ready just yet. Built with Adobe AIR technology, the app won't run on the iPad in its current state due to Apple's policies. Still, both of these high-end creations demonstrate the potential for all-digital magazines on the new form factor of the tablet PC. However, incredible tablet-based magazines like these won't be limited to publishers with big budgets.

Magazine with Music Downloads and More

Take, for example, Digital Americana, an interactive literary and culture magazine made especially for the tablet experience. Like VIVmag, Digital Americana will also mix in video with their other content. In fact, they'll offer articles, graphics, videos and music plus extra, downloadable content included in the per issue price.

Part of the magazine's content lineup for their first issue will include exclusive author interviews, a featured musician with playable music tracks, a filmmaker interview and their award-winning short, a featured animator with exclusive commentary, a playable cartoon, five pieces of chosen fiction-reading from American writers and "bonus extras."

From the interactive table of contents, accessible from anywhere in the magazine, you can navigate through the available sections. A quick layout view lets you hop from page to page and you can choose to scan the magazine in landscape mode, too, if desired.

Not Just a Magazine, a Tool Too

The online designer community, Mobile Love, is also turning their niche resource into an iPad "magazine" app. Not only will their iPad app include video alongside the magazine's text, it will offer an included iPhone wireframing tool, which can be used to create iPhone applications. After designing an app, there's a button at the top which will allow the designers to request a quote from a developer if they want to have their application built. (You can see this in action in the video demo here.)

Blogs Become Mags

Video-enabled, highly interactive magazines aren't the only types of new magazine experiences coming to the iPad, either. Another developer has the idea of turning your favorite web blogs into your own, custom digital creations. Called "Blogazine," this new iPad app will let you virtually flip through blog articles in chronological order.

The concept is easy to grasp - blogs become magazines. From a centrally located button, you can tap to change from one blog to another. Another feature lets you quickly share an article on Facebook or Twitter. The app will soon arrive for the iPhone too, but it's on the iPad where it will really shine.

Can't Build Your Own iPad App? Zinio Does It for You

For publishers big and small who, for whatever reason, can't or don't want to build their own iPad or tablet application in-house, digital magazine distributor Zinio will be introducing an iPad application which provides readers with easy access to digital subscriptions and an online "newsstand." The company, which has been around for a decade now, got started by offering magazine reader software for desktop computers. Now that the mobile revolution has taken hold, Zinio has expanded their offerings to include subscription and reading experiences for magazine customers which are accessible no matter what device you use: Mac, PC, iPhone, web or mobile web and soon, iPad, plus - who knows? - maybe one day Kindle, too. Zinio's goal is to make it simple for publishers to get their content out there on any form factor, screen size or platform.

To get an idea of what these iPad mags could look like, check out National Geographic's latest issue: "Water: Our Thirsty World." According to the NatGeo website, this edition features the "complete content from the print edition, plus extra photo galleries, rollover graphics that animate features like maps and time lines, video profiles of photographers who contributed to the issue, and other interactive features." When the iPad launches, it will also have the same interactive content as is available now in this digital edition, explains Mullen.

Another Zinio partner preparing for the iPad is Sporting News, a multimedia company catering to sports fans. Their newly announced iPad app will have interactive full scoreboards, stats, rotating image galleries, sports video highlights from CineSport and guest columns from athletes, coaches and industry executives. Other benefits of the iPad platform include search, bookmarking, clipping and social sharing to sites like Facebook and Twitter.

iPad: Magazines Transformed?

While these iPad magazine demos are exciting to look at, there's one big question hanging over everyone's head: can the iPad save the flailing magazine industry? For companies like Zinio, the hope is to encourage advertisers to buy across multiple magazines based on categories, instead of just sticking with the most popular print titles. Kia recently did just this and placed their TV ad in 45 copies of Zinio's digital mags. This cross-platform digital buy was the equivalent of one print buy in a physical magazine. But this makes us wonder: will this be enough income for digital publishers to thrive? It's too soon to tell, but in the meantime, we're about to discover a whole new way of reading.

Reinventing Magazines for Digital Distribution

As the Atlantic's Derek Thompson rightly notes, however, these companies will have a hard time charging for content that they are already giving away for free online. To make this venture work, these publishers would either have to offer unique content in their digital magazines or they would have to erect a paywall around all of their sites.

Most importantly, these companies will also have to reinvent their magazines for the digital age along the lines of Wired's app for the rumored Apple Tablet or Condé Nast's iPhone version of GQ (iTunes link). One of the reasons these publications are suffering is the long lead time that makes most of the content outdated by the time it arrives at the printer. While this still works for magazines like the Atlantic, which mostly publishes in-depth long form articles that aren't time-sensitive, gossip magazines can't really compete with TMZ or Perez Hilton. Just putting a digital copy of their magazines online simply won't cut it.

The digital PC Magazine magazine, which you can download a free sample of at Zinio, employs Flash technology and opens in a web browser window. We perused the June edition, but didn't see a lot of interactivity. Also many of the hyperlinks simply opened up pages in PC Magazine's website. A letter from a reader in the feedback section of this issue noted how he likes to print out parts of the digital PC Magazine. That implies to us that PC Magazine hasn't fully escaped the shackles of print. In fact it seems very much like the print magazine simply transplanted into an eBook. The magazine has plenty of fans, and is known for its reviews, however, it still has a few tricks to learn about digital magazines by the look of it.

Back in December 2006 we reviewed a new online magazine that impressed us with its flashy design: Avantoure. It's still going strong 2.5 years later. With the tagline "life is a game," Avantoure features rich media such as animations, interactive content, music, audio interviews, movie clips and TV commercials. The May-June 09 issue is as visually stunning as ever, using Flash as its format. It's presented online, within the browser, but is also available as an offline Flash file. The magazine costs £25 for 6 issues, or £4.50 for one issue. Generally speaking Avantoure is what PC Magazine should be aspiring to be.

So to answer the question that headlines this post: has the time of digital magazines arrived? Most people would agree that reading a magazine should be a relaxing, pleasurable experience. However if you're reading a digital magazine on your computer, chances are that you aren't especially relaxed. The savior of digital magazines though will be the increasing market penetration of eBook Readers, such as Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader device. With those devices, you will be able to read magazines in a relaxing manner on the plane and on your sofa.

R.U. Sirius, who edits a new digital magazine called h + Magazine, recently blogged that he didn't take to the digital format immediately. He wrote that he first tried the flash digital magazine format out "when I was in a hurried and impatient mood... and it confounded and irritated me." Later the same night, he returned to it "in a relaxed mood" and he found it "very very very quite readable." Of course he would say that, but it does reinforce that digital magazines need to be a relaxing read for people to truly enjoy them.

Let us know in the comments which online magazines you're reading at the moment, we'd love to find out some new ones.

PC Magazine has been publishing a digital edition since 2002, but at least in its current version, this digital edition only imitates the print version in its layout, which is definitely not the easiest and most convenient way to read text. Also, the problem for print magazines is not the fact that they are physical objects, but simply the fact that a publication which only appears once a month will always lag behind its online competition, especially in a fast moving business like technology news.

A number of publishers have been experimenting with digital editions similar to PC Magazine's. The New York Times, for example, has its Times Reader application, which allows offline access to the paper. However, in a world where online access is becoming ubiquitous, these products are at best bridges to a pure online experience.

PC Magazine, of course, already has a strong online presence and a number of very interesting blogs and online video shows. The value of PC Magazine often wasn't in its news content anyway, but in its reviews - all of which are available online, without the need to subscribe to a digital edition of the magazine.

Would You Subscribe to a Digital Edition?

While we are glad to see that a quality publication like PC Magazine is taking steps to secure its future, it is not clear to us why PC Magazine would put time and effort into producing a digital edition of its magazine instead of just focusing on the online experience.

To keep up with the changing times, the new National Geographic Games division (NGG), will attempt to connect with people once again on the platforms of our modern age, including the Wii, Playstation 3, Nintendo DS, PC and Mac, the PS3 Network, and the iPhone. There will also be free Flash games online at nationalgeographic.com/channel. As always, the company's goal is to encourage people to explore their world, this time though, it's through play.

Lest you think these games will be wimpy attempts at educational experiences, it's worth nothing that Chris Mate, a former executive at Take2 Interactive, the company behind "Grand Theft Auto," will serve as VP and GM of the games venture. Hopefully, his history, which also includes Bethesda Softworks, will bring some spunk to the usually dry "learning is fun!" gaming experience.

The first game to launch will be "Herod's Lost Tomb," an online game which blends in content from both the December 2008 issue of National Geographic magazine as well as the National Geographic Channel feature broadcast on the biblical figure King Herod, architect of the ancient world.

Time Inc. launched its much anticipated magazine meta-subscription service Maghound today. The idea is that for a small fee, starting at three titles for $4.95 a month, you can swap out magazine subscriptions every month. It's like Netflix for magazine subscriptions, but unlike Netflix the selection is awful. We like the idea a lot though and we hope it will improve.

At launch, it has 240 titles, about 40 less that what Time Inc said at a trade show in June, Folio notes. In addition to all Time inc titles, of course, it has titles from Conde Nast (not all), Rodale, and others. Notably missing is any magazine from the Hearst stable, including Esquire, Cosmopolitan and others. Some of the other notables I checked on which are missing are The Atlantic, Business Week, Wired, The Economist, Reader's Digest, and National Geographic .

There's a whole world of independent magazines beyond the big titles as well, see directory sites like NewPages.com and Mygazines. We'd love to see Maghound include titles from those directories. Is it in Time's interest to do so? Probably not.

We had high hopes for another magazine experiment called Brijit, but that innovative service went belly up in May and is no longer even online.

We hope print periodicals aren't dead, because we really like reading them. If this is the best the industry can do, though, then there's probably not much hope.

We like what Maghound is trying to do, and Time's distribution largess might help it work, but the service at launch isn't interesting enough to leave us anything but dissapointed.

Features

OpenZine tries to differentiate itself from blogging sites through a number of features. One of the main ideas behind OpenZine is that you don't have to create all the content yourself. Instead, you can mix-and-match content from other zines to create your own page. Every time you see something interesting on another page that you would like to add to yours, you can clip that content and then add it to your site. Attribution is handled automatically by OpenZine.

At this point, however, there is not a lot of content available on the site. Also, integration with Flickr, which allows users to post under the Creative Commons license, would seem like a natural fit if you are looking for images to showcase on your site. As of now, however, you are pretty much restricted to either bringing your own images or clipping them from the limited pool of other zines.

Besides clipping content, you can, of course, add your own text and images to every page and add YouTube videos. Sadly, no other video services are directly supported at this time, but you can use the embed code from other video sites in any text field.

OpenZine also includes a number of social networking features, including a private messaging service and commenting functions.

One major limitation of OpenZine, however, is that you can only choose from eight different layouts, which wouldn't be so bad, if these templates didn't exactly define and restrict where text, images, and videos can go on a page.

Highlight: Image Editor

One feature we really liked was the image editor, which has a series of relatively sophisticated functions, including the ability to blend images together and to add shadows and various geometric figures. This image editor is invoked for creating cover pages for your zines, as well as for editing pictures to be featured on your pages. In our experience, the image editor for OpenZine goes far beyond what we have seen in any blogging platforms so far.

Lots of Ads

Overall, though, even your best planned layout on OpenZine might be crushed by the Google AdSense advertising OpenZine displays on your site. Even the text and image editors feature advertising, which takes away from the experience, especially because few of these ads are actually relevant to the content and all of them are image ads. We understand that OpenZine needs to pay bills as well, but it would be nice if users could maybe choose the placement of ads or if they at least didn't appear in the editing modes.

Verdict

OpenZine could be a far more worthwhile exercise if you could personalize your templates a bit more. Right now, the look and feel of most zines on the site is similar to a MySpace page, where the pages are crowded with numerous YouTube videos, images, and short snippets of text.

The real question, though, is if OpenZine offers enough flexibility over a regular blog. After all, when publishing a blog, you don't have to have lots of content available at the same time. You just add more content every day and you layout can easily resemble that of a magazine if you choose to do so.

We can see a niche for OpenZine among users who want to publish a travel diary or artists who want to showcase their work. In most cases, though, other publishing mechanisms would offer more flexibility and control than OpenZine does.

If you would like to hear more about OpenZine, here is a short video describing the service:

MagCloud is another project to emerge from HP Labs. Earlier this year, HP Labs launched BookPrep, a print-on-demand service for out-of-print books. Now, they're delivering MagCloud, a project devoted to providing small independent publishers the ability to publish digitized magazines as well as economically print on demand. Using HP's Indigo technology, the magazines are printed when ordered in full color on 80 lb paper with saddle-stitched covers.

How To Use MagCloud

To get started with creating a custom magazine, you must first create a PDF of your content using a tool that outputs high-resolution PDFs, like Adobe InDesign. You'll also need to have a PayPal account in order to sell the magazines with the markup you choose. Since the service is in beta at the moment, orders must be sent to a U.S. shipping address. Publishers can request an invitation here.

Browsing the MagCloud Selections

For those just interested in reading the MagCloud produced zines, you can create an account and then browse the selections of magazines available or subscribe to receive email notifications from the publisher as to when new issues are available. You can also choose to subscribe via RSS, but the feed does not contain the magazine's content as posts, only notifications when new issues are released.

There are already tons of magazines to browse through in diverse categories ranging from Art to Food to Literature to Finance and so much more. For example, RWW readers might be interested in the soon-to-launch magazine "The Rubyist" (for Rubyists, by Rubyists), which will focus on technical content and happenings in the world of Ruby, Rails, and Merb. Or for the more business-minded, the magazine "Professionally Speaking" may appeal, which gives tips on public speaking, giving presentations, etc.

Another great thing about a self-published magazine is that you can just purchase the issues you're interested in - the same as buying from the newsstand. You don't have to commit to a full subscription.

Previewing a MagCloud Magazine

A Great Addition To The POD World

As we noted earlier this year, the print-on-demand industry has really been heating up. Amazon launched CreateSpace and another Lulu-esque service called Wordclay began offering paperback publishing. Even casual publishing outfits like CafePress and Blurb have continued to offer options for less serious writers. Now, MagCloud seems to be a perfect addition to join the POD space. If you want to join MagCloud yourself, the signup page is here.

Here's Sean's full comment:

"My 'gut feeling' thoughts exactly...good to hear them supported with data!

I'm a great example of the digital native (though I haven't been a teen for some time, I was an early net adopter in the early 90's when I actually was a teen). Like you mentioned, I hardly ever read books. Probably only about one or two a year, and even then they're typically non-fiction as opposed to 'literature'. Magazines? Only during flights.

Despite that, I scored a perfect 6/6 GMAT writing score, and my while I forget the specific verbal vs. quantitative, my overall was in the 97th percentile.

Granted, one could argue I'm missing out on the cultural value associated with great literary works, however because I tend to lean toward heavier reading (quality news, science, etc) I don't think I'm missing out too much with regards to developing or maintaining my reading ability. And because of blogs, forums, and email, I probably write several dozen pages worth of text each week, which is probably more than many members of previous generations can claim!"