James Deuce
13th December 2012, 20:19
I love bike mags. I always have. I used to go to A&P shows and the Easter show and hang around motorcycle displays collecting brochures and mags, long before I ever had a hankering to own bikes.
As soon as I had an income I started "collecting" magazines. The magazine format allows opinion and hyperbole to creep into factual articles and there are some very clever people providing technical advice and publishing expertise and art and copy - all stuff that applies to any subject matter communicated via the glorious magazine. I'm a drummer too, so magazine's provide a window into artists I admire and often makes me rethink my attitude to those I've been dismissive of.
It's only recently that personal electronics has evolved to the point that a magazine format translates intuitively to a handheld device.
And so my bookshelves, instead of amassing several tens of kilos of glossy magazines, are being used to store a variety of woolly jumpers and kid's school projects. My iPad, combined with a couple of different apps have saved both money and rain forest.
There's a couple of caveats though. I've had the iPad for more than a year and it is only recently that magazine apps have started to take advantage of the tablet's portable multi-media capabilities. The first three magazines I subscribed to, saving at least 50% on cover price, were Motorcycle Sport Leisure (http://www.mslmagazine.co.uk/), Cycle World (http://www.cycleworld.com/), and Motorcyclist (http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/). Of these three, Motorcycle Sport and Leisure is simply a direct digital copy of what goes on the shelf in the shops. I really like this mag because they cover the spectrum of motorcycling from Sprotsbikes to Cruisiers, to Dirt Bikes and global touring tales. It's a bit difficult to read on the iPad's screen though as it's a larger format magazine and even turning the iPad on it's end doesn't help much as the font is rather small. You can get around this by zooming and the standard column layout of most magazines means you can fill the screen with a big chunk of text.
Motorcyclist and Cycle World have a dual format capability, allowing you to tap a button at the bottom of the screen and convert the magazine format to text. Quite nifty for reading the article, but it loses something without the attendant pictures and adverts, yes, even those full page adverts that promise that the latest bike is miles better than the last iteration. Even though it's usually in minute, almost immeasurable increments.
For these magazines I use an iPad app called Zinio and they sometimes dish out "free" credit which of course you can use to subscribe to another magazine, so I subscribed to Sport Rider (http://www.sportrider.com/), a Motorcyclist subsidiary. This is obviously done in the hope that you will renew your subscription at some point in the future, however once again the magazine format is a bit archaic, with just the standard magazine that you can switch into text mode. Zinio is available for PC and Android tablets, so that makes your magazine library portable across different technology architectures, at least for as long as Zinio is around. You can choose to store as many or as few issues on whatever device you choose to read on, and you can re-download issues you've removed if you want to re-read articles, or review motorcycle reviews if you're looking to buy a bike.
About 6 months ago I noticed a new motorcycle title in the Apple App Store; Cycle Torque (http://www.cycletorque.com.au/)
It was a revelation. The layout was designed for a tablet, it had embedded videos and you could tap various buttons to change images or zoom into a variety bike details and specs. You could watch on-board videos of the bike being ridden or ridden past a fixed camera, conveying a sense of the dynamic of a particular bike and how it would react to its target environment, as well as letting you hear how the bike sounded to be ridden or what your audience hears as you stylishly zoom past. Provided you could ride as well as some of the magazine's test riders of course. I did struggle a bit though. I do most of my "entertainment" reading on the train, one of the benefits of living more than an hour away from one's workplace, and it can be difficult to delicately navigate scroll-able in-article frames while being jounced along over New Zealand's poorly maintained narrow gauge railway line. Even so, I really like this magazine, it's FREE! FREE! Can you imagine it? Bear in mind though that production costs for a digital product are significantly cheaper than a print run, and when you leverage sound, video, and multiple image aspects of a particular motorcycle or story to present to your subscribers, you can imagine how keen advertisers would be to jump on board.
My favourite magazines originate from the UK though. There's a sense that the journalists for these magazines are a great deal more cynical than their US or Australian counterparts, and they sometimes even give lukewarm welcomes to motorcycles that have originated on their own shores, such as the Triumph Sprint GT, and the CCM products churned out under Michaela Fogarty's leadership. I pick up a copy of Practical Sportsbikes every month from the local pusher, err, magazine shop, and also buy ad hoc copies of Bike magazine, as well as the occasional Performance Bikes. It has irked me that Bike magazine hasn't appeared in Apple's Newstand or in Zinio (Bike India does - WTF?), but I know why now.
Bike Magazine have recently launched an iPad edition through Newstand and it is every bit as good as Cycle Torque. It has a couple of extras though, like allowing you to listen to the Dyno runs they use to produce those graphs and the latest edition had an on-board video of a ride on a Kawasaki H2 with Denco spannies (expansion chambers for those of you with no 2-stroke in your veins). I watched it over and over tonight on the train. Sad, sad little man, but what a noise and despite the reviewer claiming it was a bit wobbly and over-reacted to road surface imperfections, it looked fine to me from the on-board video. It sounded spine tingling. Bike also lists every bike available for sale in the UK with a rating out of five stars and a potted spec sheet and review and this has been cleverly included in the iPad version and is broken down on a manufacturer by manufacturer basis. The same criticisms that I pointed out for Cycle Torque are slightly exacerbated in Bike's iPad version though, as the layout sometimes requires you to scroll a column within an article and random sideways movement of the train carriage can result in inadvertently moving your finger to one side, moving forward or backward to a following or preceding article respectively. There seems to be a great deal less advertising as well, though Carol Nash motorcycle insurance still has the back page firmly in their clammy grip.
The best bit of all this is that I've significantly reduced my yearly spend on bike magazines and ended up with more of the darn things. The wife can't "see" them though, so I don't have to explain the mighty end of year pile of bike mags any more. I can't really drop them off in a Dr's surgery waiting room though, but that's the only drawback I can think of, which I am sure will be addressed as the real paper-less society kicks off.
As soon as I had an income I started "collecting" magazines. The magazine format allows opinion and hyperbole to creep into factual articles and there are some very clever people providing technical advice and publishing expertise and art and copy - all stuff that applies to any subject matter communicated via the glorious magazine. I'm a drummer too, so magazine's provide a window into artists I admire and often makes me rethink my attitude to those I've been dismissive of.
It's only recently that personal electronics has evolved to the point that a magazine format translates intuitively to a handheld device.
And so my bookshelves, instead of amassing several tens of kilos of glossy magazines, are being used to store a variety of woolly jumpers and kid's school projects. My iPad, combined with a couple of different apps have saved both money and rain forest.
There's a couple of caveats though. I've had the iPad for more than a year and it is only recently that magazine apps have started to take advantage of the tablet's portable multi-media capabilities. The first three magazines I subscribed to, saving at least 50% on cover price, were Motorcycle Sport Leisure (http://www.mslmagazine.co.uk/), Cycle World (http://www.cycleworld.com/), and Motorcyclist (http://www.motorcyclistonline.com/). Of these three, Motorcycle Sport and Leisure is simply a direct digital copy of what goes on the shelf in the shops. I really like this mag because they cover the spectrum of motorcycling from Sprotsbikes to Cruisiers, to Dirt Bikes and global touring tales. It's a bit difficult to read on the iPad's screen though as it's a larger format magazine and even turning the iPad on it's end doesn't help much as the font is rather small. You can get around this by zooming and the standard column layout of most magazines means you can fill the screen with a big chunk of text.
Motorcyclist and Cycle World have a dual format capability, allowing you to tap a button at the bottom of the screen and convert the magazine format to text. Quite nifty for reading the article, but it loses something without the attendant pictures and adverts, yes, even those full page adverts that promise that the latest bike is miles better than the last iteration. Even though it's usually in minute, almost immeasurable increments.
For these magazines I use an iPad app called Zinio and they sometimes dish out "free" credit which of course you can use to subscribe to another magazine, so I subscribed to Sport Rider (http://www.sportrider.com/), a Motorcyclist subsidiary. This is obviously done in the hope that you will renew your subscription at some point in the future, however once again the magazine format is a bit archaic, with just the standard magazine that you can switch into text mode. Zinio is available for PC and Android tablets, so that makes your magazine library portable across different technology architectures, at least for as long as Zinio is around. You can choose to store as many or as few issues on whatever device you choose to read on, and you can re-download issues you've removed if you want to re-read articles, or review motorcycle reviews if you're looking to buy a bike.
About 6 months ago I noticed a new motorcycle title in the Apple App Store; Cycle Torque (http://www.cycletorque.com.au/)
It was a revelation. The layout was designed for a tablet, it had embedded videos and you could tap various buttons to change images or zoom into a variety bike details and specs. You could watch on-board videos of the bike being ridden or ridden past a fixed camera, conveying a sense of the dynamic of a particular bike and how it would react to its target environment, as well as letting you hear how the bike sounded to be ridden or what your audience hears as you stylishly zoom past. Provided you could ride as well as some of the magazine's test riders of course. I did struggle a bit though. I do most of my "entertainment" reading on the train, one of the benefits of living more than an hour away from one's workplace, and it can be difficult to delicately navigate scroll-able in-article frames while being jounced along over New Zealand's poorly maintained narrow gauge railway line. Even so, I really like this magazine, it's FREE! FREE! Can you imagine it? Bear in mind though that production costs for a digital product are significantly cheaper than a print run, and when you leverage sound, video, and multiple image aspects of a particular motorcycle or story to present to your subscribers, you can imagine how keen advertisers would be to jump on board.
My favourite magazines originate from the UK though. There's a sense that the journalists for these magazines are a great deal more cynical than their US or Australian counterparts, and they sometimes even give lukewarm welcomes to motorcycles that have originated on their own shores, such as the Triumph Sprint GT, and the CCM products churned out under Michaela Fogarty's leadership. I pick up a copy of Practical Sportsbikes every month from the local pusher, err, magazine shop, and also buy ad hoc copies of Bike magazine, as well as the occasional Performance Bikes. It has irked me that Bike magazine hasn't appeared in Apple's Newstand or in Zinio (Bike India does - WTF?), but I know why now.
Bike Magazine have recently launched an iPad edition through Newstand and it is every bit as good as Cycle Torque. It has a couple of extras though, like allowing you to listen to the Dyno runs they use to produce those graphs and the latest edition had an on-board video of a ride on a Kawasaki H2 with Denco spannies (expansion chambers for those of you with no 2-stroke in your veins). I watched it over and over tonight on the train. Sad, sad little man, but what a noise and despite the reviewer claiming it was a bit wobbly and over-reacted to road surface imperfections, it looked fine to me from the on-board video. It sounded spine tingling. Bike also lists every bike available for sale in the UK with a rating out of five stars and a potted spec sheet and review and this has been cleverly included in the iPad version and is broken down on a manufacturer by manufacturer basis. The same criticisms that I pointed out for Cycle Torque are slightly exacerbated in Bike's iPad version though, as the layout sometimes requires you to scroll a column within an article and random sideways movement of the train carriage can result in inadvertently moving your finger to one side, moving forward or backward to a following or preceding article respectively. There seems to be a great deal less advertising as well, though Carol Nash motorcycle insurance still has the back page firmly in their clammy grip.
The best bit of all this is that I've significantly reduced my yearly spend on bike magazines and ended up with more of the darn things. The wife can't "see" them though, so I don't have to explain the mighty end of year pile of bike mags any more. I can't really drop them off in a Dr's surgery waiting room though, but that's the only drawback I can think of, which I am sure will be addressed as the real paper-less society kicks off.