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Rolling Stone Releases Free Digital Edition

by Terrence O'Brien on November 6, 2007 at 04:28 PM

Rolling Stone Releases Digital Edition

Rolling Stone, like many other traditional print publications, is working on strategies to maintain its place in the media mainstream in our increasingly Internet-focused age. To this end, the magazine has issued its first ever Digital Edition, a complete copy of the print version in digital format, including advertisements.

The "magazine" is shown as a Flash presentation, with arrows to turn the page and a zoom feature for easier reading of the text. The Digital Edition features a detailed table of contents that also includes the advertisements, a short cut collection, and search.

The Digital Edition is an interesting initiative, but not the most convenient way of reading content. The application is slow to respond and is too small to read an entire page at once. You have you to zoom in and then pan left or right and up and down to read all of the text.

That said, we applaud Rolling Stone's efforts to recreate the magazine-reading experience online for free, but the Digital Edition could use a more user-friendly reading-view and smoother page-turning before it becomes a viable replacement for the physical publication.

So far, we're most impressed with Monkey, the interactive, online "magazine" out of Britain's Dennis Publications (creators of Maxim), which is a real departure for print-style, digital versions of publications on the Web.

And we'd also be curious to see Rolling Stone (and other magazines) show up on the Sony Reader soon.

What do you think? Would you read a print magazine in digital format or do you prefer it in traditional, paper form?

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Tags: digital, magazine, music, roling stone, RolingStone

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