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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Vanity Fair on Fire: Digital Mag Shrinks Down for New KindleThursday, December 8, 2011 The best that can be said about the first generation of interactive magazines for the Amazon Kindle Fire is that they are more credible than compelling. Most publishers had precious little time to prepare for the new device. Most titles appearing on the Fire in the past three weeks are barely digitized print retreads. So the few publishers that did manage to get truly enhanced digital versions out the door in time for this launch get credited with degree of difficulty points out of the gate. And Conde Nast’s Vanity Fair on the Kindle Fire hardly needs to be graded on a curve. It is one of the suite of CN titles that is offering free trial subscriptions on the platform at launch. We were pleasantly surprised how well the Adobe-powered tablet publishing system used on the Conde Nast titles adapts to the 7-inch widescreen form factor that the platform requires. Much of the familiar interface and functionality are here. The The most important adjustment to the smaller-than-iPad scale is in the layout’s strong readability. The text is large enough for comfortable lean-back reading on the 7-inch widescreen. Most articles require considerable downward paging. But we like that the contents felt as if they flowed naturally with and inside the lengthier aspect ratio of the screen. For the short term the ads are not properly conforming to the display dimensions. We get the ad pages recreated in letterbox form, which breaks the flow and impedes on any immersiveness the app is able to achieve. And it is important to point out that engagement is compromised on the 7-inch screen in our experience using not only the Fire but also the Nook Color and early Android tablets. There is no getting around the fact that the iPad’s page-like 9.7-inch real estate makes a world of difference in just being more fun and involving. But within the limitations of the 7-inch screen, Vanity Fair shows that filling that long expanse with content to the very edge will pull the user in. Generally, multimedia and interactive bells and whistles worked. We had at least one slide show that misfired and popped up below the bottom of the display. Call-outs to the VF Web site from the embedded browser could be hit or miss as well, with some additional material not formatting comfortably in the browser window. Performance from the embedded browser often felt as sluggish as the Fire's own native browser. But overall, the slide shows, pop-up captions and tap throughs to sharing tools worked similarly to the iPad version. All that said, the app suffers from the general raggedness of the hardware running it. There is a jaggedness to most operations. there is lag for some operations, very slow pulls from Web content, or just captions and images that don’t’ seem to fade in too smoothly. How much of this is affected by Amazon’s underwhelming interface, the Adobe platform, or just a rough implementation is hard to say. Android itself is famous for its jerkiness compared to iOS, and Amazon’s versioning of it does not seem to optimize the hardware well. Let’s call VF on Fire a good and promising test, not of the new Kindle so much as the credibility of porting magazine sensibilities to a 7-inch screen. Publishers will be challenged to make the content usable and retain the strong design sense that makes magazine magazines. That is an easier balance to effect on a larger iPad. the Kindle is a nice and affordable little device, but it ain't no iPad. .
 If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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This is exactly what we are doing with Automotive Traveler. We're a small publisher that is producing a single, somewhat specialized title, using a browser-based approach in an effort to show that there is a different paradigm than costly, overblown apps.
Here's an example of what I mean.
http://bit.ly/tkmDvm
Personally, I think this will be much more important come 12/25/11 when there will be a whole new universe of readers unwrapping Kindle Fires and Nook Tablets on Christmas morning. This group will be very different than the early adopters who have made the iPad a runaway hit. They will want and demand a simple, engaging reading experience. They won't need all the bells and whistles that have made some iPad magazine apps a 500MB downloads.
They will be looking for simplicity. They will be looking for an integrated page-reading experience. They won't be looking to getting to the bottom of a page, then having to scroll back up to the top of the page to read the second or third column of text. That will frustrate them because that's not the way they read.
They won't be looking to zoom to read the text in relationship to the accompanying photographs. They will want to read the page as if they are reading an open magazine as they will be graduation from a traditional magazine-reading experience and simple, mostly monochromatic e-readers that boast a very simple interface.
Here's the four main advantages of our approach.
1. Browser based, runs on any device (iPad, Android tablets, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet, netbooks, laptops, desktops)
2. Flash-free so it runs on iPad
3. Indexed by search engines like Google
4. Stored in the cloud, no downloads required
As someone who has spent the last 20 years producing content for magazines, I tend to be pragmatic about this. I know that one small publisher or content creator will have a difficult time swimming upstream against the iPad app tide. But doesn't it make sense to produce content specifically for these new devices? And doesn't it make even more sense when this same content is browser-based so that it works at the same time on the vast installed base of netbooks, laptop, and desktop computers as well as tablets in a landscape orientation?
Why have publishers made this so difficult for themselves?
Just my two cents... but of course I'm biased in my thinking. I believe in keeping things a simple as possible.
Richard Truesdell
Co-founder and Editorial Director, Automotive Traveler Magazine, AutomotiveTraveler.com
richt@automotivetraveler.com
People should either man-up, go native and repurposed, or just keep it sensible and simple, there are people offering all solutions, pick one that suits you.