iPad Magazines Are The New Interactive CD ROMs
Mathew Ingram, Too Many Magazine Apps Are Still Walled Gardens
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Everyone talks about how what publishers love about apps is the ability to charge readers for their content again, especially now that Apple says it will allow them to charge subscriptions. But the app economy marks — for now at least — a return to the good old days when the walled-garden approach to publishing was the norm, and the Internet was just some pesky chat room for nerds. Wired’s app provides a slick interface to the magazine, but no way of actually sharing it, or of linking it to related content somewhere else — not even to Wired’s own website. It’s like an interactive CD-ROM from the 1990s.
The new Esquire app also has plenty of “interactivity,” if by that you mean the ability to click and watch an ad for a new Lexus, or listen to cover boy Javier Bardem recite a Spanish poem, or swipe your finger and watch a timeline of the construction of the new World Trade Center. All of those are very cool — but if you are looking for the kind of interactivity that allows you to post a comment on a story, or to share a link via Twitter, or to post anything to a blog and then link back to the magazine, you are out of luck. In fact, if you like the app or any of the stories within it, your only option is to close the app completely and then email someone to tell them that you liked it.
It’s ridiculous to have a dozen apps for a dozen magazines. And they are all not very connected to the web, and not social at all. There is mos def room for innovation here.
- The real problem with magazine iPad apps (econsultancy.com)
- Esquire Is the Latest Mag to Embrace iPad [Ipadapps] (gizmodo.com)
