Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Yet Another (Very Attractive) E-Magazine Fantasy

As far as I know, no one has actually spotted one of the much anticipated tablet devices–from Apple (AAPL) or anyone else–in the wild. But that doesn’t stop publishers from dreaming about what they can do with them once they appear.

Here’s the latest stab at it, from Swedish media outfit Bonnier Group, best known in the U.S. as the publisher of specialty magazines like Field & Stream and Popular Science. This one just popped up, unbidden, in my inbox, and I’m happy to share it, because I think looking at this stuff is fun.

Unlike other e-magazine what-ifs publishers have been showing off, Bonnier isn’t even pretending this is fleshed out. So no need to worry about whether it uses Flash; it’s purely a “conceptual video prototype.”

But it’s similar in many ways to stuff we’ve seen from Condé Nast and Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc.: The emphasis is on moving the entire print magazine to the tablet, then adjusting layouts, photos and other elements to take advantage of/adapt to the device’s capablities/limitations.

And like the other two prototypes we’ve seen so far, Bonnier keeps the Web and other outside elements (Twitter, etc.) hidden unless you call them up–in this case, via a groovy radial pop-up.

That said, this one does look pretty slick, though it’s entirely possible that this is due to the video’s production qualities. And that dashing designer, Jack Schulze, looks and sounds like the kind of people who play dashing designers in movies.

There’s no sound on this clip for the first 32 seconds or so, so don’t be alarmed. And if you’re going to watch it, it’s well worth tapping on the video and watching it at full-screen size.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

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