Check out This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. It illustrates one possible vision for digital magazines in the near future, presented by our design partners at BERG.

The concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which
people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories.

The concept uses the power of digital media to create a rich and
meaningful experience, while maintaining the relaxed and curated
features of printed magazines. It has been designed for a world in
which interactivity, abundant information and unlimited options could
be perceived as intrusive and overwhelming.

The purpose of publishing this concept video is first and foremost to
spark a discussion around the digital reading experience in general,
and digital reading platforms in particular. Thus, we would be more
than happy to hear what you have to say regarding the concept and
ideas expressed in the video: the magazine reading experience, digital browsing, text versus images, as well as hear about your own digital reading experiences and thoughts.

Forgot the Kindle., it is OUT by seeing one of these! This concept aims to capture the essence of magazine reading, which people have been enjoying for decades: an engaging and unique reading experience in which high-quality writing and stunning imagery build up immersive stories. This conceptual video is a corporate collaborative research project initiated by Bonnier R&D into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices

Since the birth of the digital technology, man has gradually but unequivocally transformed himself into a digital man, where most of the information being processed in the digital format. Today, it is possible to see digital television, listen to digital radio, write a digital mail, send over a digital line, through a digital mobile service, and read digitally on the fly from anypart of the world in a blackberry or any other of the digital gadgets filling our lives. We play digital games and we watch digital movies/ TV shows that sometimes have not even been released in our home countries.

Digital Information can be seen from anywhere and from any digital device, which allows an ubiquity that was not possible before, and man has become used to access information immediately, without delay, and with the commodity of using google or any other search engine to help him trace and find quickly the information.

Paper has been resisting, but gradually newspapers are read over the web or in PDF format, and the books with new ebook readers (hardware or software) are following the same trend, become digital items on a digital ether. Magazines are next in the road, as  many companies are researching in how to transform our monthy magazines into digital versions.

I have found on VIMEO a very interesting show case about what could be the future of the magazines, and that the same example can help where we are heading as digital men and women.

Have you been meaning to subscribe to American Cinematographer Magazine?  Or are you looking for the perfect gift for the filmmaker (or aspiring) in your life?  Subscribe to ASC Magazine now for huge discounts off of the newsstand price.

Now subscribing to ASC Magazine is super easy and available at Filmtools.com

ASC Magazine – Print Subscription

Still the most popular option, the classic print subscription is available in a variety of subscription lengths starting at just $15.  Take it with you on that commute, keep it on the coffee table, in the lobby, or anywhere else for leisurely reading.
ASC Magazine – Digital Subscription

The digital magazine subscription, also starting at $15, is perfect for those who travel, or even those aiming to reduce their carbon footprint.  Get ASC Magazine delivered to your email and read it on any computer, wherever you go.  Ideal for international subscribers!

American Cinematographer magazine is the premier journal of motion picture film and digital production techniques and has been published by the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) since 1920.

I have always been a fan of listening to music while reading and when I came across this video yesterday for the new (coming soon) Sports Illustrated digital issue, it got me thinking.

With all the buzz in the past year about tablet computers (Example: Rumored Apple tablet and the Microsoft tablet) I started to think of the benefits of reading magazines and books on these new devices.

Music sparks emotion, sets the mood and tone, and can take an experience to the next level (as displayed so well in movies). So why not do that with digital magazines and books. Because the files for books and magazines for a tablet computer would all in code, publishers would have the ability to embed music files within the text to enhance the experience for the readers.

This idea could create a whole new outlet for artist to license their music and reach a target audience. For example, imagine reading an article about the Ohio State v. Michigan football game and you could have a choice to listen to the Ohio State or Michigan’s marching band while reading… or the “We don’t give a damn about the whole state of Michigan” song… I mean whatever, think of the possibilities.

Another great place this would work really well is for advertisements. Now, its not much different than seeing an ad online with a video and sound, but think of it this way. You subscribe to a local magazine that as an advertisement for the House Of Blues. On this page, the House Of Blues provides a list of all the bands that will be performing for the month of January, 2010. When you read this, you will most likely not know half the bands listed to perform… But, with a digital edition of the advertisement, you would have the ability to sample each band right off the advertisement. How perfect would that be?

There is always the issue of trying to place an artist’s music with a magazine or book. Not all articles in a magazine will necessary be appropriate for music, and it may be hard to license a musicians work for a specific article too. Some artist may not want to be associated with a specific magazine, or the subject of an article… who knows. So there are some road bumps, but the idea is feasible.

I think that magazines and newspapers that are jumping on this idea of creating digital editions, should add licensing departments or something similar to help develop and place music in their products. Or music supervisors should start pitching potential music placements to these companies and build relationships, so when or if they need music for their products, they come to them.

I hope there is a future of music placement in the digital print media.

Check out this video and join in the rumor mill.  Lots of folks think that this demo is a barely concealed, 2010 Mac tablet.  Or not.  The next 12 to 18 months in the tabler market are going to be very exciting.  I wouldn’t by a black and white e-reader now.  There’s too much on the horizon.

The first video clip shows the magazine interface in action on an HP touchscreen notebook.

The demo below is also compelling (aside from the creepy hands) and indicates that this tablet/interface  will be more than an e-reader.

Terry McDonnell, editor of Sports Illustrated, and his team have been working for months with The WonderFactory, a NY-based design shop, to build a digital version of the magazine.

This video is a highlights reel; SI has a working prototype that’s ginned up for an HP touchpad, which was given to focus groups. They loved it by the way. There was even consensus that people would be willing to pay $50 for both the paper magazine and the digital version. (The best verbatim: “Sorry—can we go back and see the ad again?” People loved the Weber Grill ad, which you can see in the demo.)

The demo was done in Air, because it was easy to do it in Air. This was not a religious choice—that is, whether we actually produce magazines in Flash/Air remains to be seen. The intent was to imagine a “giant iPod” kind of device, and build the best possible user experience. It would be easy to step this down a bit for the smaller screen and produce it in, say, Cocoa Touch for the iPhone, for instance.

My two cents: I think this is really cool. Terry and The WonderFactory’s David Link (who I think is destined to become the Roger Black of the digital magazine world) and the gang did an amazing job, and I can’t wait to see this go into production.

So I’m all of about 7 days into this whole research thing, but already I have my preferences.

It’s funny because just a few months ago, I was convinced that my company should change how we present our magazines on the web. Right now, most are available as searchable text with an option to view a PDF of the magazine pages. My belief was that we should flip that. Push the PDF — granted a much more useful, interactive, and just plain cooler PDF a la Texterity or Zinio — to the forefront and give readers the option to view the plainer, formatted text if that’s their choice.

Here’s what I think today. It’s still the right thing to make people “name their poison” and choose how they want to view the digital magazines, but I’m really liking what little I’ve learned about the ePub format so far. Mostly that we can convert our XML to ePub and leave the rest to the customers, who can feel free to use whatever ereading device they choose. Even a Kindle after an additional conversion.

Then I saw this. Maybe I’m actually on the right track. Maybe.

We are so happy to be featured in Audrey²! Such a cool mag! 

“Audrey 2, is a non-profit, bimonthly digital mag “Showcasing the current coolness of the South African creative industry”. It’s owned by the creative public, that’s right even you. So what does that mean? Well besides having the license to use words like fuck-face and cover grey moral areas like “snowballing’s place in the studio”, we essentially have a digital publication that we own and control. Okay great so now what? Well Einstein you feed it. Got (insert appropriate plumped-up adjective) ads, copy, designs, images, illustrations, gripes, information, basically if you got something to show? Submit it.”

[to download - click on the cover]

Let’s say that the iThing, and all the tablets like it, are indeed the magic bullets for the publishing business: People are willing to pay for reliable, produced and highly packaged content. The e-mag experience is way more fun, useful and convenient than the paper magazine. And advertising—full page, video heavy, relevant, measurable—lifts off like a rocket.

We can assume that publishers will slowly stop giving away their exclusive content for free online. Many big media sites will become more like billboards, advertising the bounty that lies within pay walls, without giving away the value.

To be sure, the closer you are to news, the more you’ll still have to give away something for free. So the New York Times, Time Magazine, CNN.com and so on will still have to give away the fungible stuff. But the exclusive, the highly produced and packaged—all that will start living inside paid apps.

Naturally, that’ll make it a little harder for blogs to grab the interesting bits from the pros, at least to the extent they do now. I assume, for instance, that rights holders will be more vigilant in enforcing “fair-use” limitations.

But the rising tide will lift all boats—and the blogs too, especially the established ones.

That’s because the same benefits that tablets bestow on old media will accrue to new media as well—in spades.

At the low end of the food chain, the opinion-based and gossip-mongering blogs probably won’t get subscription revenue, as they adapt to the “page” format of a tablet, they will almost certainly enjoy far better advertising revenue.

The real winners, I suspect, will be blogs and small sites that do original reporting, and are scaled in a lightweight way, with low overhead, lean staffs and a mass of loyal readers. It’s pretty easy to imagine a world in which, say, TechCrunch or TPM or even something more capital-intensive such as Slate, Makes $$$ Fast in the next few years and becomes the most efficient business model.

Here are some comments from people who have bought a copy of The Gold Edition:

“It’s Tight” Elliot Alexander

“I was reading my copy in the lounge last night, had to leave it to go out. This morning, my dad’s adopted it!” Anthea Whittle

“Received the most beautiful and interesting arts magazine! Is gorgeous and such quality gloss print paper!” Amie McCarron

“Love the Gold Edition, very nice!” Amanda Gray

“Loving the mook. Tres chic, tres impressive, tres sophisticated. Niiiiiiicce.” Michael Riordan

You can still buy issues by clicking here.

Two things I hate more than anything are math and exercise. No, I am not 500 lbs. I just don’t like exercise that is boring. I prefer to backpack and rock climb. Yes, I am a teacher, and I teach math and do a very good job at it. I have always struggled with math because I am dyslexic and learning disabled. I taught myself how to do math, and now God uses me to help children who need it. I don’t have to like math or exercise to know it is good for me. Being honest with my students helps them to learn that, too. I am also honest when I say that I groaned when I found out that the product I received free to review for the TOS Crew was an exercise DVD that incorporated math. And no, the vendor doesn’t control what I say about their product. However, I am fair, as well as, honest. This isn’t about me, but about helping my parents find products suitable for their students. If you read my blog regularly, you will know that once again I was pleasantly surprised at what I found.

The DVD, Gymathtics, created by Carrie Scheiner and her family through Suncheine World, LLC. Is well-produced and developed. Ms. Scheiner uses the premise that learning is enhanced by making as many connections in the brain as possible. Information from even seemingly different topics can be joined together and taught through activities to increase the connections leading to even stronger learning connections. In this case, math concepts are connected with physical exercise movements. Many students will find this odd, but this odd difference lends to its interest and fun. The program provides a warm-up section that has your body making lines, circles, and polygons that stretch your muscles preparing them for the more strenuous exercises to come. Your student will practice various ways to count as they do aerobic exercises, and then the intensity increases with pattern power as your student will do various pattern movement activities that strengthen the muscles and heart. On the screen there are diagrams with math information about polygons, circles, different kinds of visual patterns, and skip counting methods. Most are self-explanatory. During her exercise instruction, Ms. Scheiner also gives more math information verbally. The DVD finishes with the “Well-being Wind Down” section where she leads in relaxing stretches cooling down the body from the aerobic activity while explaining healthy lifestyle choices. These choices are placed on the screen as text at the end of the exercise program. The multisensory concept of math and exercise together is unique, but many students will find it delightful.

Being multisensory, many special needs students will be able to access it and benefit from its information such as those with autism, learning disabilities, dyslexia, attention deficit and attention deficit with hyperactivity, especially. Deaf students will be able to get a lot of detail from the math concepts as well as being able to follow the exercise steps pretty well visually. Ms. Scheiner often demonstrates the moves before the exercise begins. She could do this every time to be more beneficial. A Deaf student might benefit more from the math concepts if more of what Ms. Scheiner relates verbally is added to the diagrams on the screen or more diagrams were used during the exercise segments. Blind students will be able to access the music and dialogue of the DVD. Ms. Scheiner, trying not to overdo the verbal content for probably time purposes and interest of the student, may at times not give enough instruction of the movement of the exercise for a totally blind or mostly blind student to easily do the exercise. A little more specific instruction could probably be done to allow for more accessibility by a blind student. Math concepts could really use more verbal information added to allow for more benefit of the blind student, as well. Ms. Scheiner does a good job without probably even trying to provide accessibility. I am pretty certain that she could do an excellent job when aware that her DVD’s could be used by an even wider audience with just a little more thought and planning of verbal script and diagramming. You may think that there is no hope for the DeafBlind student. Well, I participated right along with my student helpers for this review. I, of course, could not get any information directly being DeafBlind. My students tactually explained to me the moves and the math concepts. I didn’t always do them perfectly, but it allowed us to giggle a lot. My readers know that I like lots of giggling during my lessons. Giggling equals fun, and fun equals better learning and longer remembering.

Gymathtics is a unique, but great way to get your students moving and possibly learning some math. They may not even realize they are” doing math”. This is their first DVD, $24.99,  but more are available and others being developed. Their website at http://www.exploramania.com has these DVD’s and other products like exercise mats and balls using math.  Check them out, and you may soon be giggling over doing polygons and parallelograms.

Go here to download your free Holiday digital magazine.

Thanks, For the Mommas & Mojo Savings.

I’m building a Facebook Fan Page for October Custom Publishing (my company), in order to try and get us out there a little more. On there you’ll be able to view almost every page of every magazine we’ve either published or been hired to create thus far. I’d really appreciate you becoming a fan, and I’m happy to return the favor! Take a look at the page here. Introduce yourself!

History, by the definition of http://www.dictionary.com, is the branch of knowledge dealing with past events. An old history text I had in school and can’t remember defined history as the story of man. There should only be one story, but that isn’t the way it is. As a Christian, I know that man’s story is only possible because of God, so really history should be defined as His story. Secular historians as guided by the great deceiver, Satan, have sought to remove the creator of history from the story. Church history took God’s story and corrupted it over and over again for the power derived for one group or another. There are as many church histories as there are denominations and religions.  How do we know what is truth and what is not? The answer is simple. The truth is the Bible. God has filled His word with His spirit and keeps it from corruption through His spirit stirring in Man’s heart. How can we teach our children the Truth and guard their hearts from the corruption of the world? We can try to teach them only the Word of God and keep them away from all dissenting forces while they are with us. When they leave, we can only pray that their hearts and faith are strong enough to withstand any attempt to sway. Often, we know that plan fails. To me, a better way is to teach our children the Truth, but expose them gently and carefully along the way to what the world teaches as we lay it beside the Bible for comparison. When viewed by the light and truth of the Bible, all other things will either confirm or deny God, the creator and Jesus, the son and Savior, and the Spirit who acts upon the hearts of man throughout time.

The Amazing Bible Timeline that I was given free to review here is a tool that seeks to give parents the ability to instill not only the Truth in their children, but also that strength of heart and faith to withstand the attempts to sway and corrupt. The originators of this timeline researched all the many histories of our time and past and placed all those together side by side in the chronological order of time along with the history as present by God through the Bible. They have made it as thorough and accurate as humanly possible. The company continues to update it as more is learned about history and as God and man continue to write history. The material is presented simply as an expanded time line incorporating the many time lines of the Bible and other world histories without emphasis to one religion, denomination, or secular historian. This gives the parent the full control to use the tool to teach their child how the Bible teaches and what man has sought to confirm or deny of that truth. Using the method of presentation given for the use of the chart, it is easy to see how God has influenced the world as His creation despite men and Satan’s efforts to purge the evidence of Divine influence.

The 37” X 45” chart is multicolor-coded and lay out is circular and wide to be as useful as possible despite the overwhelming amount of information provided. The print is small and difficult to read at times, but a magnifier helps. In addition, the company provides Adobe Reader .pdf format files on their web site free after purchase for download. With those files, it is easy to zoom into one particular area to study the contents more closely. Use the chart on the wall or a table along with the computer files either on the computer or printed out for particulars areas you wish to highlight at a particular time to see the specific events within the bigger picture of history as a whole. In this way, it is easy to see how the control of the Romans and culture of Roman society affected the Jews as they rejected the Messiah because they were hoping at the moment for an earthly king to rid them of their captors. Or, you can see how God influenced man as He worked to purge our country from the sin of slavery, and directed the forces that prevented Hitler from ruling the world.

As far as accessibility goes, the company providing .pdf files is a great help for the Learning Disabled and low vision students who might want to use the time line. The blind and deafblind will not get any true use of the product due to lack of braille access. The company must use graphic files, and there is no way to present graphic information in braille except as a verbal or written description which may or may not facilitate comprehension. Parents and teachers will have to find other ways to present the material to them.  One suggestion would be to take the information and provide it in small chunks of time with a tactile and braille-labeled timeline. If you provide all the material across the circular bands for a time period of a 1000 years or smaller increments, the students could gain the knowledge the same way by seeing the variations of history for just that period for comparison and study. Even though accessibility is an issue for some here, this product should not be discounted. The knowledge gained by students or parents in preparation to teach students can be invaluable.

In addition, the company, Bible Charts and Maps, LLC provides a document presenting tips for using the timeline for Bible Study and history teaching. They also have interactive maps for the Holy Land and a genealogy of Jesus Christ in various file formats to use, as well. The Amazing Bible Timeline chart is $29.97 plus shipping and handling including the digital version and the interactive Holy Land maps for free. Go to http://www.BibleTimeline.net for more information and to purchase. Use this tool wisely and as intended, and you have a resource to help build your child’s faith on the truth of Jesus Christ.

paolo is represented by ford model management.
son of eighties model, lynn koester; anchisi has been making some noise on the scene.
he lands the cover of digital magazine, 160g second issue.
photographic credit to eric sposito.

imagesource | mdc

It’s that time of the year again where in-between neglecting duties to my family and multiple full-time job deadlines, we somehow managed to crank out another issue of GivingCity Austin. Please hit this link to download, and PLEASE send it to as many people as possible. We’re probably not going to do another unless we can find someone willing to bankroll it for us, so the more people that see it, the better chance there is that someone may want to.More pages after the jump….although I’d really rather you went here and just download the thing.

We’ve been working on digital magazines for about four years now, so they don’t seem like such a new format to us. But if you look across the Web, you’ll see a lot of bad examples of the format.

Not “bad” so much as wasted opportunities. What other digital magazines seem to forget about the format are two main things:

1. It’s on a screen
2. It’s still a magazine

I know these points are obvious and so don’t mean much on their own, but let me explain.

It’s on a screen. Why are you creating your magazine in the same way you make the print magazine and just uploading the PDF? First of all, the dimensions are all wrong – it’s a portrait image on a landscape screen. No one likes to scroll up and down on each page. Secondly, in order to read anything - because people still read magazines – you force people to zoom in and then out again to see where they are.

So we’ve got two really bad experiences going on in a single screen: scrolling up and down repeatedly and also zooming in and out. It’s no wonder people don’t like to read digital magazines.

It’s still a magazine: Then there are those that create the PDF for the screen (thank you) but then make this hideous, boring, flat, amateur-looking “magazine” with clip art, and try to compensate by running annoying Flash videos and audible page turns. The latter is a gimmick, the former attribute has yet to be proven as something that will attract and engage readers. We link to videos outside the magazine, but I’m not sure you want to watch it within the magazine.

Wait, scratch that. Watching it within the magazine would be great, but we have yet to see this function well. If it loads quickly, the video screen is usually very small. And if it’s big enough it takes forever to load.

The thing is, this digital mag thing has potential. Here’s a list of its top attributes:

1. Cheaper to print. Because you don’t print it.
2. Cheaper to distribute. Notice on these first two I didn’t say “free.” They still require a lot of work, but the cost is exponentially lower.
3. More… pass-along-able. Yes, you can hand your print magazine to a friend or float it in a doctor’s office for a month, but you can post a link to a digital magazine on Facebook, Tweet about it, email it, add it to a comment, add it to your LinkedIn page… think of the reach.
4. Linked up. Think of the potential of “link journalism.” And think of the power of an ad with a Web-specific call to action a reader can actually act on with a click.
5. Long-form content mixed with compelling design. You can’t get that on the Web the way you can in a magazine.

We’re obviously fans. If you think you’d like to explore the benefits of a digital magazine for your organization, please let us know.

My best friend Emma is a very talented artist, you’ll remember in this post, I mentioned that she was going to be doing the cover art for The Gold Edition.

Well yesterday the canvas showed up with a magnificent painting on it. I am showing you now, because once I changed the file in photoshop to CYMK, it looked crap, so I am not going to be able to use it as the cover, but I still want people to see the hard work Emma put in and how talented she is:

She isn’t on the web yet, but I am fixing her up a blog once she sends me some photos, you’ll be able to see more of her work. She is a chalk board artist and also does fantastic paintings. She wants to get in to babies portraits too, (she has two daughters, my fairy god-daughters.)

She also did this painting, which hangs above my computer:

And I have chucked this one in too (sorry it is on the wrong angle) but it is of my work space, and that drawing in the middle is one of my most prized, it was done by one of my four year olds I taught in Korea, and is a picture of Harry Potter. I heart this drawing!

Smart move by Conde Nast today: The magazine publisher of Wired, Vogue, the New Yorker and others announced it would start porting over entire magazines—not vertical slices or website apps, like other publishers have done thus far—to the iPhone. First up is the men’s mag, GQ, which Conde says will be ready to go in December, for $2.99 an issue—$2 less than the newsstand price. Nat Ives has the scoop in Ad Age, and Peter Kafka has a good take at AllThingsD.

Conde is doing a number of things right here.

1. It called bullshit on the notion that appgazines should enjoy the same crap CPMs as websites. I’ve been saying this all along, because if you stop and think about it, you’ll see that these new products ought to represent the best of both the print and online worlds. If someone subscribes to a digital magazine, and reads it—and it’s delivered on a lovely color tablet—the full-page ads ought to generate the same CPM as print. Indeed, Conde figured out that these new mags should be even more valuable since these new ad formats will also provide engagement metrics (pageview/clickthru and so on) to the whole dilly. So Conde is valuing this media as print CPM PLS online CPM.
2. It’s creating its own platform for making digital magaziness. I’m assuming reusable templates for magazine pages and something that will help advertisers hack together their own ad pages. But who knows? The point is, if this works, they have a model in place that will, one assumes, scale and encompass all its titles, and advertisers.
3. It’s preparing for the new Apple Jesus Tablet. If you think this is just about the iPhone, you haven’t been paying attention. This is aimed at Whatever It Is that Apple is rumored to be announcing in Q1. That said, I am haunted by a conversation I had a few months ago with a very senior guy at Apple. “If I thought the iPhone was all you guys were coming out with in this space, I wouldn’t be so interested,” I said. Senior Guy replied: “Then you’d be making an enormous mistake.” I read this to mean, build for the iPhone and your product will be even better on whatever Apple comes out with next. Which is what Conde is doing.

I have a few questions, though. For starters, I can’t wait to see the product since I know that simply porting over, say, the PDFs of your pages ain’t going to cut it. Unless you’re able to perform some serious mojo—extracting the text and reflowing images and so on to make everything more readable on the tiny screen—PDFs don’t work. I’d also like to learn about how much extra production will go into each issue—Conde just fired a bunch of folks. How many will it need to hire back to retrofit GQ for the small screen?

Does this mean that Conde won’t be in the much-discussed, yet-to-be-seen magazine coalition that Time Inc. is said to be organizing? Not necessarily, I guess. There’s no reason why you can’t pursue both at the same time. And clearly, Apple taking 30 percent is so much better than the alternative: Roughly 50% of the cost of making a magazine is related to printing it and distributing it. So if you could immediately convert your rate base to Apple users, and let Apple handle the transaction, you’d be rolling in clover…

And finally, if my old pal Chris Anderson, editor of Wired is out there… I’d love to hear what you think about all this. I’m wondering if the fact that Wired isn’t the guinea pig an indication of where you stand on the question of separate digital magazines… I believe you’re an unreconstructed Googleite, after all, and may believe that the best iteration of Wired on a third-screen device is, open and browser based rather than delivered by subscription. Also Chris: Links or no links?

My erstwhile confederate Erick Schonfeld over at TechCrunch, takes me to task for arguing that digital magazines will not behave like websites—that is, they will not have links:

If the Web has taught us anything it is that information does not exist in a vacuum. An article without links is a dead story. An interesting artifact perhaps, but not something that will engage and delight the modern reader, who finds information these days by following links or passing them around. If you close the door to the Web, you’ll only be locking yourself in.

I worked with Erick for years and believe that he is almost always the smartest guy in the room. As usual, he makes some great points here. And, in a hypothetical world—where we’re talking about ideas and have nothing concrete to look at and dissect, I believe him…

But, brother, let me tell you: I just got back from a week at the mother ship in NY, where I’ve been watching a few digital magazine experiments take shape over the past four months, and I am more convinced than ever that readers will not miss links…IF we’re able to achieve in reality what we can do in prototype. Erick’s CD-ROM analogy has been haunting me ever since we first discussed it some time ago, and the teams that have been working in NY are putting together products that are exceptionally fluid and elegant that manage to keep the reader within the “appgazine,” delivering a great, focused experience.

The only thing I am 100 percent sure of at this point, is there’s no right answer—yet. I expect that, as powerful third-screen tablets evolve, e-magazines—and by “magazine” I mean packaged, curated, vertical, periodical content—will evolve right along with them. And some will use links and be browser based while others will function as downloadable, updatable apps. At this point, I’m strongly advocating the non-browser approach since what we’re able to achieve, once freed from that frame, is so much cooler in every way.

Mainly though, I’m thrilled that Erick agrees that magazines will survive in some form.

I moderated a panel today at the MPA Innovation Summit, and, as is always the case, Mary Lou Jepsen blew me away.

Mary Lou is the founder and CEO of Pixel Qi, whose amazing display technology is about to make its debut on a variety of new devices. First up is a tablet that Mary Lou said would be announced by an as-yet undisclosed OEM, perhaps in November.

She was toting around the latest build of the Pixel Qi screen, which had been grafted onto a garden-variety netbook, and it was exponentially better than what she showed me at the start of the summer. This baby is finally ready for prime time.

The LCD screen is “transflective”—a word that I had never seen until Brian Lam of Gizmodo used it the other day. It means that the LCD can work in a reflective mode (like a Kindle—you need external light to see it) or emissive mode (like a typical, backlit LCD.) A flip of a switch lets you choose between refelctive or emissive mode. You want that choice since reading is easier on the eyes without backlighting, but video is much better with it.

I was struck by how damned good the screen looked in reflective mode—color was acceptable, though naturally, not brilliant. But it was good enough for magazine pages (if you were, say, reading outside) and you could even watch a video. Mary Lou said a typical device could run for 20 hours in full-on reflective mode, depending on how much video you watched.

Best of all, the PQ display produces 200 DPI and renders text at least as well as a grayscale Kindle, which can only manage 167 DPI. (OK, I doubt anyone could see the difference there. But still, one is color and can do video and the other can only handle grayscale text and images, so that’s not even a contest.)

I asked the panel, which included Doug Carlson of Zinio and Marc Canel, who oversees the software side of Qualcomm, how long before we’d have what I think of as the “everything screen”—a first-generation color display, with a multi-touch 8-inch screen and wireless connectivity, that can handle everything from magazines to music to movies. They all agreed that we’d have a number of these within six months, no problem. So, yay!

An interesting sidenote to tech history: MLJ pointed out that this would be the first time a cutting edge technology was first used among poor children in Africa, then exported to the developed world. Mary Lou developed the LCD display technology for the One Laptop Per Child project at MIT.

In the last 3 months, Zinio, which produces digital editions of print publications, has added over 1,000 magazines and books to its portfolio of offerings.  But ask anyone you know who doesn’t work in the publishing biz what Zinio is and you’ll get a blank stare.  A new partnership with Target, announced today, could help change that. 

Reuters’ Robert MacMillan reports that Zinio will sell electronic versions of magazines on a digital newsstand on Target’s website.   

MacMillan notes, “these titles are meant to look — if not feel — like the print magazines they are replacing.”  The question is, if consumers wanted to experience the look and feel of print magazines, wouldn’t they just read one?   Zinio announced earlier this year it would make its offerings available on Plastic Logic’s eReader when it launches, so consumers will have to make that call in more than one place.