In recent years I’ve stopped reading magazines. Instead, I spend my time ‘reading the internet’ and actually, I’m reading more than ever. I don’t need to tell you how infinitely better it is to use the internet for ‘free’ than it is to spend anywhere from $10 to $25 on a magazine. With the exception of well-designed, well printed art and design magazines, there’s not a lot I consider worth paying for in print.

Enter the tablet...
Once I got my iPad, I downloaded the Zinio app and started subscribing to magazines; some I had read in print like Car and Driver and others I’d never heard of before, such as American PHOTO. These magazines are ultra cheap—a 12 month subscription of National Geographic is about $45 on Zinio (normally about $120 in print).

The problem with digital magazines that I’ve seen so far is that they’re glorified PDFs with very basic navigation. There’s no problem with that if you’re just after the articles, however, publishers are wasting a big opportunity by providing static content to tablet computers that can handle so much more.
Recently I was invited to try Car and Driver’s new magazine app. It’s a little different to regular mags because it offers rich content and online connectivity so that readers can discuss stories.

In the featured stories, especially sports car comparisons, the featured cars each have a video (with sound) of the journos putting the cars through their paces and talking the reader through facts & figures. All of a sudden readers can hear what the car sounds like and can see it in action. I actually expected this feature to work like a tacked-on afterthought with heavily compressed video, but surprisingly, all of the videos have very good video and audio quality and can be viewed in full screen. They are discreetly thumb-nailed at the bottom right corner of the story’s first page and would easily be missed if they didn’t auto play.





Images can be labelled with points of interest that, when touched, launch an alternate, close-up shot of that item or feature. Other images allow you to scroll through a gallery on the page, whilst touching them once will launch the gallery in full-screen. A really nice touch is the way the magazine changes its layout automatically according to the orientation of the iPad. Text, images and design elements are neatly rearranged—images are even re-cropped to suit the layout. That’s impressive. The cover image and the ‘hero’ images for featured stories even display alternate shots of the vehicle.



Navigation is a breeze. There’s a table of contents where you can browse the stories, a contents list that you can call up from any page and browse through each page. Swiping any given page to the left or right takes the reader to the first page of the previous or following articles. Scrolling down takes the reader into that their chosen article.



Rounding out the experience, there’s a newsfeed button that details the latest articles from the Car and Driver blog.

There’s nothing groundbreaking in any of these features, but it’s clear that careful thought has gone into them. The designers haven’t sacrificed the integrity of their template by including rich media and have seemingly maintained a good amount of control over the app’s development.

It’s not perfect. You can’t zoom into a column of text like you can with most texts in iOS, nor can you zoom in on images that don’t have a zoom function built into them. There’s no way of disabling the auto play on videos—this gets a little annoying if you flick back and forth between pages. Finally, some of the interactive graphs have reveal features that just aren’t necessary.

The app, downloadable for free from the App Store, is both a reader and a newsstand store in one, selling single issues for $5.99 and offering subscriptions monthly for $2.49, annually for $23.99 with some back-issues for free. That’s a pretty decent pricing model, when you consider the extra content. Everyone’s a winner—customers pay less and publishers slash their print overheads and increase their reach in one move.

Not all publishers have the budget for this kind of app, considering the expected upkeep of rich content like videos and interactive graphs. But overall, I feel Car and Driver’s new magazine is a step in the right direction for digital publishing.


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