Magazine designer and enthusiast Jeremy Leslie is pessimistic about the iPad’s prospects for reviving the magazine form:

“The main issue is that readers — paying or not — aren’t engaging with overtly magazine-like apps. There’s a simple reason for this: printed magazines work better in every way. They are a simple one-off purchase that can be used (both in a navigating and reading sense) anywhere. They are lightweight, easily shared and disposable. You’ve heard the arguments plenty of times but this first year of apps have done nothing to weaken them. Why would you buy an app when it only repeats the printed magazine?”

Obviously, I agree.

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