There are an ever-growing number of iPad-based magazines out there and they broadly fall into one of two categories: quick-turnaround PDF-style versions, which tend to be flat exports of the print magazine, and more involved, more time-consuming conversions that completely redesign the magazine for the digital platform.
The appeal of the former is certainly clear from a publishing point of view – it’s quicker, it’s easier and it’s far, far cheaper to do – but looked at from a consumer perspective it can’t help but feel a little half-arsed. A platform like the iPad opens magazines up to a myriad of new tools and possibilities that have never been available while working in print. To go digital and still treat the product as if it were ink on paper is to miss out on the huge opportunities afforded by an interactive, rich media format. It’s also, in my opinion, rather short-sighted.
The fact is that, even in an age where people carry their music on an iPod, their books on a Kindle and their films on a PMP, intangible, digital media is still seen as intrinsically less valuable than something you can hold in your hand. Thus, to justify the cost of a digital magazine, publishers need to demonstrate to the consumer that digital delivery systems can enhance the reading experience and provide their customers with an experience they could only experience digitally.
This was the ethos that underpinned Empire’s foray onto the iPad. We wanted to bring together all the tools at our disposal, throw out the gimmicks and the flashing lights and distil the digital magazine experience down to a feature-rich, multimedia offering that built upon the core magazine content without obscuring it. On a more visceral level, we were captivated by the possibilities inherent in the simple act of being able to add movies to a movie magazine.
It seems so incredibly simple to add trailers to the magazine’s movie reviews and drop clips into features but the difference it makes to be able to illustrate the subject matter you’re talking about by actually showing it cannot be understated. Empire’s subject matter lends itself so beautifully to a device like the iPad because film is a medium designed to be seen in motion and no matter how well-framed the photograph, a still can never compare.
Of course, it’s not just a matter of scattering trailers throughout the mag. The entire issue has to be re-thought and re-laid out for the iPad. Twice. Being a gyroscopic device, the iPad is expected to work in both orientations and to prescribe that a reader must use portrait or must use landscape would have been a poor user experience – if a whole lot less work.
One of the discoveries we made quite early on was that standard back-to-front magazine navigation doesn’t quite cut it on the iPad, simply because you lose the ability to flick through pages. To that end, we implemented a web-inspired approach in addition to the usual page movement controls. By giving each section its own contents page, and linking those directly to articles, we tried to make the journey through the magazine as painless as possible.
Lots of magazines have done something similar, whether it be contents pages or interactive coverlines, but we tried to anticipate the user’s journey through the magazine in a non-linear fashion and give them a method whereby they would never get lost within the publication. To that end, we included interactive section headers on every page so that no matter where in the magazine you find yourself, you’re never more than one tap away from the nearest contents page. The result is a method of navigation that is more familiar to Net users, where a central hub branches out to related content pages and allows readers to absorb them in whatever order they want, rather than funnelling them down a single path.
Reader feedback to the navigation and the issue as a whole has been overwhelmingly positive. We won’t pretend we’ve suddenly solved the digital magazine approach but I do believe Empire (along with other publications such as Wired) has been a step in the right direction and provided consumers with an alternative to print that enhances the print experience with richer media content and interactivity. Certainly our commercial partners Jameson and 20th Century Fox agree. We’re not trying to replace our printed edition, nor move all our readers onto the iPad but it’s an exciting time where we can explore a digital platform for publications with that ‘magazine’ feel that you can never quite get from surfing the web.
