Mag+
December 17th, 2009 | people I know
We’ve been working with our friends at Bonnier R&D exploring the future of digital magazines. Bonnier publish Popular Science and many other titles.
Magazines have articles you can curl up with and lose yourself in, and luscious photography that draws the eye. And they’re so easy and enjoyable to read. Can we marry what’s best about magazines with the always connected, portable tablet e-readers sure to arrive in 2010?
This video prototype shows the take of the Mag+ project…
is the award-winning creator of graphic novels such as 
This is excellent – the ideas being knocked about fit in with what digital print needs to become; especially in refernce to the ‘non-completist’ aspect of an RSS feed (That it is ongoing: infinite and, ultimately, frustrating).
I’ll end with a cliche: More ideas like this and there will be less talk of ‘print is dead’.
Aha, but what’s the battery life?
Wow. This interface makes me fun and if I have it, I want to read magazines every time.
In Japan,they have suffered poor sales but I watch it, I confirm the possible about magazines’ future!
The big problem with any of these ‘concept’ products, though, is that they don’t take into account the real-world issues of battery life, heat dissipation, processor speed, etc. It’s a great mental image, but these types of products are always going to entail compromises.
That said, everything you see here is do-able in the iPhone SDK, and it’s not hard to imagine an Apple tablet that could do this. What they do leave out, though, is really the meat of the device, which is how you get to this reading interface, how you navigate amongst the various magazines you might have stored, how you search and browse, and what other functions the device might have.
They treat this as if you’ve got one of these devices for each magazine you own, and you just pick it up and read it as if it were this month’s Popular Science on paper. That’s exactly the opposite of the selling proposition for a reader of this type.
[...] Late last year, I told you about Mag+, BERG’s re-envisioning of the digital magazine for iPad-like devices, and showed you a prototype video. [...]
I think the idea is less about the hardware and more about the publishing concept, and not even the ’software’, more like the ‘content delivery’.
Given the abilities of new products on the market (ipad, etc) the goal is to revision how we interact with the MEDIA, not how we interact wiht the hardware.
I just hope these concepts are open source and the design fundamentals make it to online self publishing. If they don’t then this is one companies one-trick pony, and the ‘easy as reading a normal magazine’ mantra won’t work, since almost all printed magazines universally compose covers and pages.