Everything but inky fingers
Digital print mimics the real thing--and tries to improve on it
"I don't like paper," grumps Tony Perry, a software systems architect in Orlando. "Stacks and stacks and stacks of magazines do nothing for me." But Perry recently found a way to start clearing his desk: digital magazine subscriptions. Now when a new issue of MIT's Technology Review or eWeek comes off the presses, Perry simply clicks a button and downloads it--headlines, graphics, fancy layouts, ads, even those irritating pull-out subscription cards--to read later, on his laptop. "It's like I'm carrying an invisible stack of magazines with me onto the plane."
For the same price as a print subscription, and sometimes for less, tens of thousands of magazine and newspaper readers are happily pointing and clicking their way out from under reams of paper. Two services launched within the past year--Zinio Systems, which carries mostly magazines, and NewsStand, which focuses on major U.S. and foreign newspapers--let subscribers download periodicals that painstakingly replicate the "dead tree" reading experience, and even try to improve on it.
With the click of a mouse, newspaper readers can flip to an article's continuation, without having to fuss with unwieldy broadsheet paper. If you want to hunt down an article but can't remember which issue or even which publication it was in, a simple keyword search conjures it up from a digital archive. And if you are logged on to the Internet while reading, related Web sites and E-mail addresses are just a click away. As with print, you can also highlight text, scribble notes to yourself, and pass entire issues along to a friend.
Page-turner. "Readers want to feel that they're actually reading a magazine," says Mike Edelhart, president and CEO of Zinio. "We even show the page turning as they browse along." The experience could get even more lifelike once subscribers can read their magazines on a Tablet PC. These svelte, notepad-size computers, to be introduced next month, can swap screen orientations from landscape to portrait to match the dimensions of a standard magazine page.
Still, there are limits to any medium that has to be displayed on a computer screen. You can't stuff a computer into your back pocket, toss it on your nightstand, or read it in bright sunlight. And while a screen easily accommodates a magazine page, browsing around a broadsheet newspaper is another story. When you first call up a paper on NewsStand's reader, it displays a full-page summary version in which only larger headlines are legible. Zooming in requires repeated clicks on a small magnifying glass at the top of the screen.
As with most things tech, the faster your Internet connection, the more enjoyable the experience. Magazine download sizes tend to run from 5 megabytes to 12 megabytes. A Sunday paper can clock in at twice that or more--and take an hour to transmit over a dial-up connection. The inconvenience can be minimized, NewsStand says, by downloading the next day's paper while you sleep at night or loading one section of the paper while you read another. But broadband users usually can zip through an entire download in minutes.
That's why Zinio started with technical publications aimed at engineers and scientists, who would read the periodicals at work, over a high-speed Internet connection. It has also lured international readers, who were paying roughly double the cost of a domestic subscription to cover extra mailing charges. Digital distribution lets them get their issues as fast and as cheaply as domestic subscribers. "More than half of our new [Zinio] subscribers are overseas," says R. Bruce Journey, president and chief executive officer of Technology Review.
These days, though, Zinio is looking more like a regular magazine rack, with 26 offerings that include National Geographic Traveler. NewsStand, for its part, now posts 27 newspapers every day, right down to the classified ads, including the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Tampa Tribune. Nine magazines have also come on board, including three publications from Consumer Reports. At that rate, expect to see more people flopped on the couch with laptops on their bellies, flipping pages with a click.
This story appears in the October 14, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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