A Race Between Digital and Print Magazines (New York Times Barf Alert!!)

This morning I decide to try a little experiment: I opened up my iPad, clicked on the little Wired icon and purchased the magazine’s latest digital issue. After I agreed to fork over $4, it began downloading. For the next phase of the experiment, I grabbed my car keys, left my apartment and drove about 12 blocks to a local magazine store in Brooklyn, where I also purchased the latest issue of Wired magazine, this time in print.

I didn’t run any red lights, or speed, or park illegally during my shopping expedition. Yet when I returned home with the glossy paper product in hand, the digital iPad version still hadn’t finished downloading to my iPad. Anybody who reads Wired would call this an Epic Fail.

You don’t need a computer science degree to conclude the results of this research. Digital magazines are currently too big and bulky and almost defeat one of their main intended purposes, the promise of instant access to content and information.

“Publishers are not putting enough thought into delivery and the constraints around that,” said Ned May, an analyst for Outsell, a research firm focused on publishing and technology. “In many ways it harkens back to the early days of the Net where people had to wait 15 minutes for a single image to download.”

When Condé Nast, publisher of Wired, first launched the digital replica last year, thousands of ebullient readers across the land enthusiastically set out to read it in the new format, but many quickly grumbled online about the file size. Since then, the magazine file size has been cut in half, but it is still too cumbersome for today’s networks.

Anybody who reads Wired would call this an Epic Fail.

What an utterly disingenuous, fraudulent article! Firstly, he provides not a clue to the speed of his internet connection. He may have been using dial-up from the way it downloads so slowly. The correlation between the time it took him to acquire the dead-tree version and the time it takes him to download the digital version, is meaningless, wholly specious. No intellectually-honest attempt was made to compare the two versions. I could provide numerous of examples how, why this article makes is utterly biased, an outright insult to the intelligence of its readers as demonstrated in the article's comments.

The thing is that the abject fear of all those whose economic well-being is so dependent, intertwined, with the success (lack thereof) of the dead-tree version, as so palpably demonstrated by one as pusillanimous as the phony-sounding moniker of "Nick Bilton", that objectivity, straight-talk is sacrificed in the name of "survival". How is the attitude of Nick Bilton, his head stuck up you know where, going to forestall the inevitably of the paper of record going out of business in the slightest? How is this drivel going to change the reality of "Nick Bilton" and his ilk as part of the crew merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? He must be terribly desperate to sell himself out as unconscionably, cheaply as he did for not much of anything in return.

The publishers worry more about names than they do quality. They aren’t bringing in talent, or new concepts, or anything in depth. It’s nothing that interests people and the doors are shut tight. These days more people are self publsihing at content websites than they are trying to break into the established literati circles. There’s no point and the press aren’t really going out and finding the sotry, but waiting for the story ot come to them.

This screed has entertainment value but nothing else.

One could very well want electronic and hard copies of a publication for different reasons. You can’t instantly word search the dead tree, and it requires awkward maneuvers to scrutinize finely detailed pictures in the e-magazine.

Even if the goal is to humanly read the whole thing as fast as possible, the e-magazine could feasibly download while it is being read, making the delay moot.

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