Digitalized Magazines

I am a lover of magazines. The thought of a complete eradication of print media breaks my heart (particularly because I dream of a job at a celebrity weekly magazine). This week I was very proud of a story by old employer, OK! Magazine, about Rachel Uchitel—one of Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses. The magazine got an exclusive interview with Rachel and I was really looking forward to buying the magazine this week.

Unfortunately the magazines are released on Wednesdays to select cities but take till Friday to get to Ithaca, N.Y. where I go to school. So this week I decided to try something different and after a persuading tweet from @okmagazine I decided to buy a digital copy of the magazine from Zinio.

The magazine cost $3.49, the same as the newsstand price, so no savings there which was slightly annoying, but I was eager to see how the magazine translated online. While it was really nice to be able to read the magazine I wanted to read on Wednesday (and not Friday!) and not have to leave the comfort of my apartment to get the magazine, I wasn’t completely pleased with it.

I found it hard to zoom in on the pages and be able to read text and see pictures simultaneously. I gave the company feedback about these two problems because I want digital print magazines to succeed! After reading the whole magazine from cover-to-cover at a much slower pace than usual because my computer has been acting up (but that’s completely my fault for keeping too many songs/TV shows on my computer), I wished I just could have bought the physical magazine

Overall, it was interesting to read a magazine online, and I’m glad I did it and had the first-hand experience with it. But I think I would have been much happier without my slow computer and a physical copy in my hand, particularly as I was so used to read this format in print, and it is designed to be that way. But I will say, there is a lot of potential and room for improvement with the digital version. I am eager to see what happens with this, especially after the recent meetings between the government and media industry.