Apple Tablet as Print/Magazine Page-Turner

A potential interactive page-turner – think iTunes for magazines, books (much less multimedia sexy) and especially daily print.  Time Inc. and The Wonder Factory put together a demo on a HP touchscreen, and for those with tablets, potential online subscription and micro-transactions loom.

Via The Death Of The Blog Post – Smashing Magazine, there’s a discussion of how much the design of individual posts adds value to the read – similar to strong copy, quality posts versus mass-news, pop cultural clippings (aka standard blogs).

Is it the timeliness, frequency or relative exclusivity or breaking news factor that makes certain articles into reader magnets or SEO payloads?

RSS readers are jam-packed with articles every day, and chances are, the articles that don’t get your full attention will get lost in the crowd. Keep your short musings and thoughts for Posterous and Twitter, and spend some real time hand-crafting well-thought-out articles. You’ll satisfy both yourself and your readers.

On an altruistic side, blogs and blog nets create open discussion, communication and the free sharing of news, but if you opt for more design, will the quality of the writing always be premium?

Or does more design – see the Gizmodo/Techcrunch quote after the jump – mean continued budget losses at big publishing houses, tied to high-priced writers? Yes, the design and publishing world will move to the upcoming Tablet like the music labels beat a path to iTunes.

Of course, there’s many naysayers, around the idea that these Tablet magss (aka “tab-mags,” although that sounds tabloidy) will just be overproduced and expensive via Time’s Manhattan Project Will Explode Like the Atomic Bomb It Is – Time Manhattan Project – Gizmodo and Techcrunch

I’m sorry, Time Inc. and Condé Nast and Murdochs of the world, but magazines are not dying because they are printed on paper. They are going under because many other factors. Here are some of them: Reduced attention spans, reader’s demand for instant satisfaction, and a general change in visual culture and codes that have rendered the page concept obsolete in favor of more anarchic, time-organized information structures, as well as non-linear ones.

So get over this phase, this desperation of yours to keep the old into the new. That’s not how innovation happens. Don’t try to translate pages into a tablet format by just adding multitouch, animation, and Twitter links. Instead, think about how the new medium can deliver content in a truly different way, rather than just putting pages together into glorified PDFs. If you can live up to the promise some people believe in, you may succeed. But until you really nail it down, you’ll keep reducing staffs and closing publications, no matter how many Apple Tablets are sold. [TechCrunch]

So where does this leave the 2010 Apple Tablet – everyone will buy one as the next holy iteration of the iPhone, and one hopes it enlivens recession consumer spending – but the print and pub worlds will have to immediately start subs and micro-transactions while finding a way to make their world feel interactive, multiplatform and multitouch, while keeping costs down.