CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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The Problems With Digital Copies of Magazines

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

this entry brought to you by the strokes, "machu pichu"


A magazine I subscribe to just launched an on-line edition, and sent me an email asking me to upgrade. What I thought this would mean was that I would have the actual physical magazine and, when I found something in particular interesting and wanted to see supplementary stuff for it, say, videos, bigger screenshots, I could go to the digital version; so I upgraded. Then I found out that no, this is an either/or proposition. "Upgrading" meant cancelling the print version, and having the digital version only.

This will not do. I read magazines from cover to cover, but if I'm on the Internet and click on an article-- and that assumes I actually click the article instead of just browsing headlines, whereas with magazines I will generally read the whole thing regardless of interest in individual articles. If I'm on any website besides Cracked.com and it says at the bottom anything more than Page 1 of 2, I will cease reading it. This is not something I'm proud of, and in fact, I've had many a tab open for days and days with the intention on coming back and reading past page two, only to eventually realize I will never get around to it. Furthermore, I almost never actually click videos on websites unless they are comedy related. I'll click clips from The Daily Show, I'll click stand-up comedy, but if there's an embedded video, I'd rather just read the summary of it in the article. Don't get me wrong, I love wasting time on Youtube, and will frequently browse stuff on it. But embedded videos? Yeah yeah, I've read the article, I get the gist.

I don't know if I'm an anomaly in that I actively read magazines and look forward to them-- and also have absolutely no interest in carrying around a Kindle or an Ipad to read them at this juncture, because if I lose a magazine I can just buy another. If I lose my Kindle not only am I out the Kindle, I'm out everything that was on the Kindle.

Yet whether or not I'm a weirdo old timer when it comes to my interest in magazines, I know I am not an anomaly when it comes to reading things on the Internet. An in-depth magazine will go unread on-line, because Internet reading is good for browsing, not actual reading. I can't imagine my subscription going to any use on the computer-- I simply will not sit down and actually read the thing in front of the screen, if for no reason other than the fact that reading my laptop on the crapper means burning the shit out of my legs.
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with love from CRS @ 3:27 PM 

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