chaplin

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Yesterday's Guardian column

The man from the financial institution held a glossy magazine in one hand and an extremely small laptop computer in the other. He leaned across the desk. "Surely it can't be long," he said, "before somebody finds a way to put all of this on one of these. Then you can just read it all off the screen." (Ctd...)

8 comments:

  1. I think you're largely right but only for the time being. The form factor of the desktop PC doesn't lend itself to magazine reading and the laptop, although closer isn't there either but it's a lot closer and at least you could take it almost anywhere you might normally read a magazine!
    What is needed is a "magazine reader" similar to the one that Amazon has just introduced but with bigger pages. At the moment if you want to read a magazine on your PC (and I don't mean a magazine's web site) with something like Zinio you find yourself constantly zooming in and zooming out to read which means you lose the whole feel of a magazine.

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  2. Anonymous11:47 am

    I have stopped buying a newspaper during the week, unless traveling on a train, as I can read from all the papers online. Though I find this satisfying, it is hard to stumble upon interesting articles outside my core areas of interest, which does happen with a hand-held paper.

    On the other hand, Arsenal's website offers the opportunity to read the match programme online for free. But it is so awkward I hardly ever bother and tire easily when I do.

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  3. But you can't relax in the bath with Zinio, can you.

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  4. The batteries never ran out on my copy of the beano, you can't flick through a website, what will we line the cat litter tray with, you don't get funny one liners down the spine of a website and more seriuosly there's a danger with online stuff of us getting lazy and un curious just ticking the boxes of the stuff we think we want not being shown or falling on items we might like given a try. Also most newspaper websites are as ugly as sin and crap to use.

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  5. Anonymous6:34 pm

    I read a statistic that for every one percent more broadband connections, readership of newspapers decline by one percent. Seems entirely reasonable to me, as I too often skim the paper online if I'm busy. But of course you miss things because you don't know they are there. It seems a shame to me, but if they insist on putting the whole paper online what do they expect? Magazines, by contrast, are notable (except for some US exceptions) for not putting their content online. But mags are made for flipping through and for using (mostly) photography well in their design. Although I would like to see mags like Word archive their content (say, over a year old) for subscribers or whatever. It would surely become a valuable resource which would attract a lot of traffic, and thus advertising as well as increasing the reputation. After all, who keeps piles of old mags, and who ever bothers ordering old copies? And I think that some of the articles and interviews are priceless and they deserve to be preserved online (and kudos to the journalists too).

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  6. ian - Who keeps piles of old mags? That would be me! I can lay my hands on at least the first 100 Q magazines and a good number of 30 year old NMEs. If I could get then all on some DVDs I might (just might) be tempted to get rid of some of them. One thing that I've noticed though is that when going through old magazines and newspapers, once the original reason for opening it has passed, the main things I look at are the adverts so it's important that any archived version don't just limit themselves to the articles.

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  7. You don't want to be putting loads of data on discs. It causes all kind of trouble if you lose it. I work for 'em so I know.

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  8. Anonymous4:22 pm

    Nobody's mentioned the sublime pleasure of half an hour sat on the khazi with Word or the like. The laptop can get a bit hot in those situations...

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