The Awesome Potential of Digital Publishing

So, I've been thinking a lot about digital publishing.

Books, magazines, and, to some extent, newspapers are starting to hit the same transition that music faced with the advent of the iPod: digital distribution. Let's not get into the history and hurdles, because, while interesting as all hell, I don't know nearly enough about any of the industries involved. What I'm interested in is the possibilities.

Let's look at magazines. They're far from a dying medium, but they've got it rough. There's a lot of competition, and a lot of upfront costs for printing and distribution. Digital distribution largely eliminates all that; your magazine can be published and accessed almost as easily as a high-schooler's blog. All your need is your creative staff and the IT guys.

Now, there's no doubt that owning a bound, printed magazine is nicer than owning a digital copy. It's larger, for one thing, you've got more real estate on the page. It's a lot easier on the eyes than the iPad screen (I'm waiting for the big-screened color Kindle, at which point I will be buying the biggest memory card on the market and downloading every magazine and comic book known to man). It has a sense of tangible...ness to it; weight, smell, piling them in a stack on your desk. The printed magazine is a beautiful thing.

However, let's think of all the things you can do in a digital edition that can't be done on the printed page. Obviously, there's integration of sound and video. Now, one must be careful about this... if you're just throwing little animated pictures and movies and sound bytes all over the place, then you've just got a webpage with a lot of annoying banner ads. That's not a magazine. Magazines are for reading, first and foremost. In my mind, a good article with good art direction would have to be the start, with the additional bells and whistles only showing up when the user selects them.

The first advantage that springs to mind is the "infinite canvas" of the iPad's screen. While page space is limited in an ordinary magazine, in a digital version you could theoretically have thousands of lavishly-decorated pages. In many magazine articles, you'll see tons of side bars summarizing fun facts in a few paragraphs. In a digital edition, you could have the user, if he or she was so inclined, click on it to expand it into it's own "full-sized" feature. For example, say I'm writing an article about the "Back to the Future" trilogy and I want to do a sidebar asking scientists why we don't have hoverboards yet. I may have six sentences and one picture in a regular magazine. In a digital edition, you can expand that out and give each waffling scientist you interviewed two pages, if you were so inclined. Throw big pictures in compelling page layouts all over the place; it's not like you're going to run out of pages!

Then, there's sound. I read that "The Economist" magazine's digital edition had audio files of all of the articles read by professional V.O. people. That's incredible. Read in bed, listen when you're driving to work in the morning. Truly, that is a wonderful idea that I hope is implemented into every single digital version of the printed word ever.

Music is the other big thing. If I'm discussing "Sonic 2," you can bet your ass I'm including a sidebar (that, again, expands into it's own feature with infinite space to fully explore the tangent) that includes the memorable tracks from the series. Take a listen. Perhaps set the whole series playing in order while you read the rest of the magazine. Even transfer any and all songs to your iPad's music playlist (or whatever the hell it is). Of course, there's also magazines like, oh, I don't know, "Rolling Stone" that this might be a boon for. Independent musicians can offer songs or whole albums that you can listen to in the magazine. Hell, you could have a printed review of an album, and then listen to the song while the critic gives his spoken commentary.

Video is a more direct break from the reading experience. People often listen to music while they read, but it's next to impossible to watch television and read at the same time. Not that video doesn't have it's place; the power of video is so pervasive that it's not even obvious, it's like an ephemeral constant. In a digital magazine format, however, essentially you're saying "Here, stop reading, watch this video, then come back," even if the video is only seconds long.

Something similar, and only very narrowly applied to gaming magazine, is, well, games. I recently read an interview with a prolific Swedish indie game developer, with screenshots of several of his works. What if you could just pinch the corners of that screen, pull it up to the edges of your browser, and start playing then and there? Or begin playing a demo for a game right from the advertisement? Some very cool possibilities. Again, however, it's largely an experience completely divorced from reading the magazine itself.

There is, of course, all of the digital connectivity stuff as well. Highlight, chop up, combine, and make annotations to articles, and send "collages" to yourself and friends. Set anything you read about to be downloaded or shipped to you, or do instant searches to get more information and similar products. Link specific items not only to features and previews in back issues, but also to pertinent analysis and retrospective in future issues (y'know, assuming you're reading a back issue).

I think the main thing is just to make it look like a regular magazine to dad. If you go in with all the bells and whistles ringing and singing, you're going to lose the art of the magazine. Make sure that when there's an extra, be it an expandable sidebar, a soundtrack, a movie, a download, there's some kind of marker that's noticeable but nonintrusive. Keep all the strengths of the printed page (save for those dependent on printing a page) and make the extras available but not forced onto users, and you could create something that truly takes that informative, entertaining power of magazines to a new level.

Books too, I guess.