By David Pakman
The iPad was announced on January 27, 2010 and was quickly heralded by many in traditional print media as a potential rejuvenator for their trouble d bu sinesses. Having used the device daily for th e last six weeks or so, I must admit it is the perfe ct media consumption device, among many other things, for all of my reading (books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, tweets, FB feed, emails, web sites). Given my propensity to multitask, I crave multi-purpose devices and find the Kindle far too limiting a product, especially for the price. The iPad is perfect for email, calendaring, surfing, reading books, digesting RSS feeds, browsing real-time web feeds from Twitter and Facebook, watching movies while traveling, listening to music, checking weather, tuning in to baseball games, and countless other things. It is a far better way to consume magazines and newspapers than any other electronic device I have seen.
Given this, more than five months after it has been announced and the developer tools made available, and more than sixty days after shipping, why is Wired one of the few print publishers to make the leap and offer a version? The WSJ has a decent app (but downloads take forever), the NY Times has an anemic reader which showcases only a handful of stories each day (many duplicated in each section), the NY Post released an app which just offers pictures, and Vanity Fair offers a meager PDF of the print magazine for a whopping $5 per issue. USA Today seemed to step up with a nicely designed app. But it’s telling that so few of the traditional print publishers have taken the last five months to rethink the way a magazine or newspaper ought to be delivered digitally and devote sufficient resources to getting something great out on time. Wired’s editor Chris Andersen made some noise about how his staff did this, but frankly their implementation is also mostly a glorified PDF with some videos thrown in. Amazingly, URLs are not hot-linked in Wired nor Vanity Fair, email addresses are not clickable, text is not selectable nor are articles tweetable.
Read more: BusinessInsider.com
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