After iPad-magazines established now since over one year, it is time to get better. This is what some magazines already did when it is about their interaction design and the readability. But there is one major lack: performance and size of the magazines.
Publishers make smaller magazines!
After iPad-magazines established now since over one year, it is time to get better. This is what some magazines already did when it is about their interaction design and the readability. But there is one major lack: performance and size of the magazines.
iPad-magazines usually have a download size of 300MB for each issue. This is unsually big for one magazine I always thought. The first Adobe Digital Publishing Suite magazine, WIRED, had about 500MB. There followed some other magazines that even were bigger than that.
Now, as software and technology evolved, we have other possibilities and are able to do much smaller magazines. The problem is, many publishers don't go that way. When a year ago the first iPad magazines went live there only was one way to publish: PNG-articles with uncompressed assets. This resulted in very large files. Now this is the past and we are able to publish to different resolutions with so called "renditions" and we can use the PDF-format to create smaller files using vector-formats. This results in a usually 1/4th of the size of a PNG-stack. So if you use this for the iPad3 you get the same size as a PNG-stack for standard iPad. Quality and speed indeed is much better with PDF-stacks as the size is much smaller.
What I experience is that most publishers serve the iPad3 to satisfy users with a high resolution screen. What they don't care are all the users with an iPad1 or iPad2. Often they have to download exactly the same filesize as high resolution users. This is completely unnecessary and causes crashes on these devices. Today it is possible to serve different resolutions to different devices. It is no problem to serve a rendition for 1024px768px and another for 20481536px as well as many others for the Android devices. One even doesn't have to create two InDesign documents but only a second folio in the Adobe DPS with a different resolution. This can be done automated using the sidecar.xml generator by Johannes Henseler and the multi-import functionality (except it doesn't work with local folios).
So dear publishers, make smaller articles using:
- PDF-stacks instead of PNG-stacks
- HTML-stacks where it makes sense
- compress images and assets wherever possible
- try to reduce video assets inline
Your readers will thank you.