WIRED to Fail: Digital Magazine Meets Analog Dollars & Sense

A renewal notice for my annual subscription to WIRED magazine arrived today. According to the renewal information, the cover price for 12 issues is $59.88, or $4.99 per issue, but my special subscription rate for a year is a mere $20.00. And if I want to give someone a gift subscription, I can get them a year for FREE.

It has not been lost on me that WIRED is available in an electronic format. I already have the iPad, so I cruised over to the App Store to check out my options there. The magazine has its own app, which you can download for free. You can also get a free preview of a magazine give the app a test drive. Free. This sounds good.

But the math and convenience quickly breaks down.

• Future issues of the magazine are $3.99 per month, or $47.88 per year.
• There is no annual subscription. You buy and download each issue individually.
• Want to put a routing list on the magazine and share it will colleagues? You could route the iPad i suppose, but that’s an inelegant solution to say the least. I use mine every day, and would not want to see it go missing for weeks on end. ¹
• A typical issue is of WIRED for iPad is 500 MB. For those of us using a 16 GB iPad, over the course of a year the issues would occupy 6GB,  or 37.5% of the available disk space.
• The articles in WIRED magazine become available to the public about 30 days after the issue hits the newsstands. So with any subscription you are primarily paying for early access to the content.

So the question becomes, should I get a paper edition of WIRED for $20.00 per year and continue to use routing slips to share it with my colleagues, or pay $27.88 more per year the magazine for the iPad version?

WIRED would have me believe that the value-added in the iPad version is worth the premium. WIRED did not simply create a PDF of the magazine version. They have engineered an interactive, multimedia version of the magazine. Or so they would have us believe. Not quite ready to plunk down my $3.99, I tested out the demo edition, assuming that they would pour a lot into the demo to showcase the product.

So what does an electronic edition actually get me?

• A win for environmental sustainability. One can argue that the electronic delivery is more environmentally friendly. Even if the magazine is subsequently recycled, the paper and ink still need to be manufactured, and the magazine printed and shipped. On the other hand, the electronic version presumably requires more production time and resources, thus burning more CPU cycles, additional server space, etc. It may be a wash, but I am giving a nod to the environment if for no other reason than it makes a statement.
• No ads. This might be worth some money, but I have pretty much habituated myself to skip them in the print version. My brain is like a TIVO in that regard, fast-forwarding past these analog interstitials. I also tear out and dispose of all the paper inserts before I sit down to read a magazine.
• Rich media. One of the reasons for the hefty file size (the demo is only 50 MB), is that all of the video and audio downloads with the magazine. This means brilliant performance, and the video and audio files in the demo are quite cool. Personally, I’d prefer to have a choice of downloading the media or connecting to them online to save disk space.
• Personal chat time with the authors. Just kidding! Nothing so dramatic as that. Indeed, there’s nothing more to add to the benefits list.

Navigation has some pluses and minuses. There are basically two methods: Table of Contents View and Page View, shown below. Each has its advantages. If you want a quick way to navigate to a specific article, the Table of Contents View is the way to go. If you are trying to recall a specific graphic, photo, or multimedia piece, the Page View may work better for you.

I definitely did NOT like the part of their navigation where to go deeper into an article, you scroll down. I personally prefer to page through articles in the same manner I do an e-book. A preference setting in the WIRED app could fix that.

Bottom line is that I am skeptical of the superiority of this particular magazine format.

Here’s what would help:

Like the e-readers from Apple, Kindle, and Nook, I want to be able to highlight text, get definitions, search within the text and through Google and Wikipedia, place bookmarks, and retire read editions to the hard drive within my computer’s iTunes account. I don’t want periodicals of any kind to require their own App, and I don’t want tp buy them one by one. I want the downloaded files to be smaller. And I want to be able to share my magazines with my friends, even if it means erasing it from my device to pass it along to a colleague.

The game is afoot, but it’s early in the game. I’m was hoping to be blown away, but WIRED didn’t do it.