I edit and publish an online-only magazine, Automotive Traveler (automotivetraveler.com/jump/156) so I speak with some experience on the issue of digital magazines. When a magazine is built from the ground up to be presented digitally, you can optimize the presentation in many ways. It requires an entirely different way of thinking about magazine design and layout; instead of two pages making up the “spread” in a traditional magazine we design our page to fit a wide variety of computer screens. As the world goes from a traditional 4×3 format to a 16×9 relationship, things are easier, from the standpoint of design.

When I sat down with my designers two and a half years ago when we first thought about our layout template, we made some very calculated decisions about things like font selection for instance. I use a compact, 4-pound laptop with a 13.1-inch screen (smaller than the typical laptop) for all of my editing but we’ve tested our layout with displays from a 9-inch Sony laptop all the way up to a 60-inch plasma flat panel, which can be easily read from 10 feet away from the Lazy Boy in your home theater.

Skeptical? Try it for yourself, select and load a conventional magazine that has been re-purposed for the web; there’s hundreds out there from a number of publishers on a variety of platforms. Here’s a link to one that can be viewed for free. (tinyurl.com/MuE-HP – I use this because it is both representative of a traditional magazine ported digitally as well as the fact that I contribute to it) Then load Automotive Traveler (automotivetraveler.com/jump/157) and ignoring the subject content for just a moment, compare how easy it is to read, follow and navigate in each environment. I’m confident that you will immediately see a difference, no matter what the size of your display. To further optimize the presentation of Automotive Traveler, hit “f11” to go into a full-screen mode in your browser and watch what happens to the size of the “page” as it resizes itself to optimize for your monitor and screen resolution.

Just because magazines have always had vertical page orientation doesn’t mean that they will in the future. That was the first convention we threw out the window, not shackled by having to work off the vertically oriented script. We knew that there was little chance, in this business publishing environment even two years ago, that we would try the even more expensive route of a print companion, no matter how much we would have liked to go that route. And in reality, with all the interactivity we’ve built into our digital presentation, I truly believe that a paper version of what we’ve done would pale in comparison. (Of course, if you want a hard copy, you can always print out specific pages. I will not go into how much greener Automotive Traveler is and how we by-pass all the current problems with distribution of magazines to news stands.)

We are a tiny publisher serving a very specialized niche. But there is no reason why a larger, forward-thinking publisher can’t do what we do. But I will tell you that while we work with a great platform supplier, the IT team at Automotive Traveler has integrated several enhancements “under the hood” to fully optimize our presentation. This is the value-added package that we bring to the game. Do we have all the answers? Of course we don’t. Building a sustainable business model based on advertising is one piece of the puzzle that has still eluded us. If the content is on the web, people expect it for free; it’s just that simple.

What these readers don’t understand is that while we have eliminated paper, printing, and postage, we still have contributors that we pay for content as well as editors, and designers to make our presentation look professional, to name a few, that are required to put together Automotive Traveler. Then there’s servers, bandwidth, hosting fees, and a guy sitting in Houston (I’m in California with the Managing Editor and one designer, another designer is in Germany, and our offices are in Scottsdale so we can truly be called a virtual printing company.) who makes all of it work, including our companion website (automotivetraveler.com/jump/156).

Sorry this is turned out so long but as you can tell, I’m just a bit passionate about this subject and hope that if you have any comments or questions that you’ll post them here or contact me direct. I’ve bookmarked this page and will check back here often. Until then I hope you will check out Automotive Traveler and check out our practical vision for digital publishing that requires no specialized device, just the laptop you’re currently using and see if we don’t have the most magazine-like reading experience (clicking on either corner of the page flips it forwards or backwards). The vision we had from the start was to combine elements of a great travel magazine with an equally great automotive magazine. Maybe you can tell us if we’re meeting that goal?

Thanks for reading.

Richard Truesdell
Founder and Editorial Director, Automotive Traveler

By the way, WSJ looks good on the Kindle, but few to no pictures (of any number of colors). I don’t know whether to blame this on Amazon or WSJ, since clearly the thing can display black and white (better then a newspaper anyway).

Also, no sign of AllThingsD which I would hope might tag along with a Kindle-WSJ subscription.

I spent WAY too much money on this thing, and would hope that competition will bring prices down significantly before I wear this one out (which could be any day now).

Reading a novel is one thing. But they seem to forget what drove color into newspapers in the first place. It was advertisers demanding color ads. You want to sell ads? Better make sure they’re color.