Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
Well, benefits and baggage. While fixed format publications are a pain on smaller devices, they do have some benefits. One of the biggest benefits is quality control and another one is cost. The direct translation of a magazine from print to electrons ensures that the consumer gets something that looks great without the added cost of producing separate publications.
Another reason is to avoid reinventing the wheel, because reinvention means that you will end up rediscovering a lot of things that didn't work and were discarded. Put another way: we know how to do print. We spent about a decade figuring out how to do web pages. Do we really want to go through that process again?
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The pain of having to reinvent the wheel is certainly the reason why most publishers have opted to simply port their print versions to mobile devices as PDFs. The problem, as I'm sure you're aware, is that PDFs are essentially unusable on phones and less than ideal to use on tablets. They may look great, but they don't work great. A native experience, when well-done, is superior.
The obstacle is not lack of knowledge about how to make good reading apps—we've been doing it for nearly half a decade now and some are very good indeed—it's investing the resources. There is also the issue, probably quite salient for many publishers, that their visual identity and brand are closely associated with the way their publications look in print. Stripping that extraneous formatting away and reducing it to simple text and images probably chafes a lot of editors. Still, I would argue they are just resisting the inevitable at this point.
Yesterday I learned that another publication,
The Awl, has jumped into the fray of "subcompact publishing." They've just released a new iOS app called
The Weekend Companion which curates the best of their writing from the past week and presents it in a minimalist layout, ad-free, every Friday. Subscriptions are $4 per month or $40 for one year (51 issues). Issues can also be bought individually for $2. It's not as well-done as The Magazine, but it's in the same spirit.