Digital Mags & Vinyl MP3 Rips

Jody Medich over at Kicker Studio wrote a nice response to Kohl Vinh's post that took the creators of digital magazines to task. Kohl went as far as to say they are "killing the thing they love." Jody being involved in the Mag+2 project had some interesting responses paraphrased bellow. Some I agree with, some I don't, and all I have questions about....

People want glossy and the iPhone's success proves it. 

Maybe apples/oranges? We are talking content here, not OS/Device. While I know people don't distinguish the two, and the design of the latter heavily impacts the former, I still think the conditions for success are categorically different. Reducing the issue down to "glossy" might miss some key points. Low-fi digital zines on tablets could be more desirable than their high gloss counterparts. We haven't seen the democratization of this medium yet. One thing the web has proven is that the production value of content does not indicate success. 

The problem is lack of functionality related to scrap-booking and sharing habits of physical mag readers. 

I agree with Jody here, but it points to a road that starts to look like the Tumblr web. Where do you draw the line? What can you scapbook? Articles, quotes, images, graphics? It is a slippery slope and publishers might end up with an inferior Evernote on their hands. Is that a publisher's domain to tackle? I would wager that services playing nicely together is a more likely future. The way new RSS readers like Reeder App integrate with services like Instapaper show the path for publishers to follow. But before that can happen, publishers need to start acting like services (a topic keeping me up at night lately). What if I wanted to merge my scraps from Dwell & Modernism mag with my favorite furniture blog? What would an evernote enabled iPad magazine be like? First it would require the publishers to open up the content a bit more. iPad magazines are actually stiffer than real magazines right now. That is goofy, but unfortunatily a goof related to the viability of their attempted innovation.

There are experiential benefits to "inert" content in a world of endless flows of information.

Jody uses the Mag+2 research to back this up, but I call Henry Ford "faster hoarse" on this. Do we really need to draw a dividing line between static content and live content? Shouldn't our information consumption, collection, and curation tools provide both modes seamlessly? Isn't a physical magazine just a snapshot of a flow of curated information to be made live when desired? Will kids have the same "quiet mode" relationship to magazines 10 years from now, or will they just be boring to them?

Right now digital mags are like mp3s of vinyl record rips. Emulating, but not truly representing the essence and experience of the original. And like MP3s I think their future is in their ability to spread their contents. Imagine if you could only listen to mp3s as albums, no playlist mixtapes, no sending your friend a favorite song? I don't think digital mags are killing the format, but I think they need to embrace the medium by letting the content move and flow from service to service and person to person.

Valet. Mag's App is an interesting step in this direction.