Monday, September 26, 2016

Digital magazines

Before the millennium, MyMac.com was one of my first Mac sites/magazines I was reading, and it was delicious.
And funny enough, I'm feeling very nostalgic about the formatted, downloadable, fixed-layout magazines!  I remember putting a handful of them on my laptop and feeling cool about having virtual magazines on my machine when I  brought it out to have something to read over lunch or whereever. (Of course these days an iPad or other tablet makes virtual magazines much more portable, and flexible re how and where you read them.)

A magazine, having content with somewhat lasting value, is much harder to make than a news web site, which is what most of us are reading most of. We want to know what's new. Reading or writing more in-depth stuff demands much more of the reader.

Perhaps though, in the digital age, collecting loosely related articles into fixed packages is less relevant than in the world of paper, what do you think? (I use "Pocket" a lot for reading articles.)

But I still have pictures in my head of the old MyMac magazines... ah, there starts a new page... there starts a new article. Ah, a Beth Lock article, great...
(Oh, Nemo interviews a dude named Eolake Stobblehouse. Who's this joker?)

And I still love magazines, digital or not. And I'd like to make one, one day. It does not have to have fancy modern layout; in fact I think I may have liked the old MyMac magazine even better because of the very simple layout (demanded by the tech at the time).

7 comments:

Merle said...

I know what you mean. Being on Ubuntu since 2006, I discovered the monthly Full Circle Magazine at some point, which I download and import into my library application Calibre. Always a great read.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Hi Merle,
Right, I'd almost forgotten that... doesn't Calibre collect pages from web sites into a sort of ebook?

Merle said...

You know, if it does it's not something I've run across. I've only used it to organize prepublished ebooks. I'm not sure how that would interest me, though maybe it would be similar to an RSS reader function, in a way. Maybe?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

I guess so, except it's arranged in a handy ebook format per site, with internal links to the articles.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

So, in other words easier to read on an e-reader device or a tablet.

Joe Dick said...

Formatted, downloadable, fixed-layout magazines always make me go a big rubbery one.

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Thanks. I've sent that to the. Publisher. I wonder what he'll make of that.