Kirk Hiner at our sister blog AppleTell looks at an iPad magazine demo from Viv Mag, which appears to be a women’s magazine. It features a video of an interactive magazine article (pertaining to sex, so probably not work safe) which is basically a multimedia presentation with animated section transitions, much like an interactive CD-ROM game such as Myst.
As Hiner notes,
I’d pay to see that movie, but would I want to watch all of that just to get to a magazine article? I can’t imagine we’d have to, as this looks like quite an expensive project. In case you haven’t heard, the publishing industry doesn’t, for the most part, have the finances for quite expensive monthly projects.
It looks impressive, but I can’t imagine that magazines would need to be that fancy in their production values. Looking nice is one thing, but how much thought is being given to make sure the text is readable in the middle of that moving picture show?
Of course, I tend to prefer even static web pages to have minimal formatting, often using Readability to bring them down to just the text so that I can read more easily.
