
2016 is not the year tablet magazines get to die - prostoalex
http://www.themediabriefing.com/article/2016-is-not-the-year-tablet-magazines-get-to-die
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Anyone care to explain what a "tablet magazine" is as opposed to just the
online edition of a magazine that may or may not have a print edition?

I need to be convinced that tablet magazines were ever alive before I can be
convinced that they aren't dead yet.

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danso
The Conde Nast magazines (Vogue, New Yorker, etc) have iOS apps in which you
basically download a glorified PDF for every issue during your prescription
period. I haven't done it in awhile but the PDFs are generally massive, around
hundreds of megabytes, but contain full-color spreads and ads like you would
see in the print product.

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rchaud
The problem with "tablet" magazines are that they force publishers to pick one
tablet to optimize for. There is no equivalent to responsive web design in the
magazine sector. So what you end up with is content originally designed for a
4:3 10" Retina iPad, but also available via the Play Store or dedicated
magazine app on form factors where it has no business being, like an 8" 16:10
Android tablet, where you have to zoom, pan and scroll to see the whole page.
It is enormously inconvenient, and I would guess most people just end up going
to the website, which in most cases is responsive and will likely work well on
a tablet, laptop or phone.

Magazines on mobile devices should offer the same level of comfort and
convenience as their physical equivalent. I would love to swipe through pages
like I do on my eBooks, as I find scrolling through text every few seconds to
be a hassle and visually disorienting, especially for long-form reading.

I'm happy to continue to subscribe to physical editions of my favorite
magazines, as the mobile experience doesn't offer nearly enough at this time
to be worth my while.

