Kindle, Nook and iRex are already here, and publishers are falling over themselves with excitement that “e-readers” may once again let them lock down their content to a form that can be paid for and carried in your bag (a bit like newspapers and magazines of yesteryear).
Swedish mag publisher Bonnier‘s R&D team enlisted BERG – the Schulze, Webb & Jones design house of London – to give it one vision for such a device. The result – Mag+, a concept video for a magazine e-reader tablet…
The concept is a rather blank canvas, looking like an oversized iPhone tablet, but the visuals lack detail on what publishing standards might be used here.
Personally, I’m not convinced any of these single-function gadgets – whether for books or magazines – will be particularly successful. iPhone has succeeded because it’s not a walled garden; ereaders need more than both books and magazines.
Apple and Microsoft are rumoured to be working on multi-functional devices – it’s here, if anywhere, that tablets may really come in to their own, as near-computers, not slabs that mimic individual olde worlde media.