Well, speak of the devil. Here's a video showing Time Inc.'s digital magazine concept; take a look, then compare it to the video from earlier this week showing the UK's Sun magazine entry in the handheld display market.
(Time Digital Magazine Video)
Now, the Sun's tongue-in-cheek response to the digital magazine mania:
Time's concept was designed by David Link at the Wonderfactory, and it’s all done in Adobe AIR. According to a Techcrunch article, websites for major brands like Time generate just one-tenth of the ad revenue provided by print publications. So you could see how Time, Inc. would like to design the tablet version of a magazine like Sports Illustrated and sell it to you.
Would you pay, let's say, $500 for a 10" tablet device that would let you swipe through color pictures and read text and possibly watch videos? $500 would cover a lot of magazine subscriptions. On the other hand, you could carry around dozens of magazines (and journals and books etc.) in a tablet device, updating them wirelessly, which would be very convenient. On the other hand, now that I think about it, you'd need to pay $100s for subscriptions on top of what you paid for the tablet device.
As you see, I have too many "other hands" for this topic.
Science fiction authors from Stanislaw Lem (the opton) to Frederik Pohl (the joymaker) to Douglas Adams (the Hitchhiker's Guide) come down on the side of electronic devices for reading.
Poul Anderson's 'Brain Wave'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors." - Poul Anderson, 1953.
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