When I heard that the Wired iPad app was 500 MB, my reaction was pretty much the same as this, namely, “what year is this? 1999?” It’d be a tenth of that size or less if it was just a wrapper around a PDF formatted for the iPad’s screen resolution with a set of XML files for extra features, search, etc. 500 MB? That’s larger than the PDF sent to printers for a lot of smaller or less image-heavy magazines. Even for an image and layout heavy magazine like Wired, 500 MB is still pretty massive for a PDF downsampled to the typical screen resolution. Several years ago I bought a magazine archive on CD-ROM with 250 issues going back to the 1970′s, full text, decent image resolution and nicely indexed and bookmarked. For that, 500-600 MB seems an appropriate size. 500 MB for a single magazine issue seems like a great way to make the iPad/iPhone network performance complaints even worse.

I keep hoping to see a killer app for digital magazines but they all still seem to be glorified PowerPoint presentations (“look, page transitions!” “look, it’s a video ad embedded into the magazine page!” yeah, nice, I was doing all that 5 years ago…) with a few extra features like search and, if you are lucky, bookmarking or sharing. They want to nickel and dime you for each issue of that? I’d much rather have a PDF in its original format with full text and an archive that goes back decades. I’ve purchased a lot of gaming material as PDFs and guess what? The world doesn’t end if I’m able to extract an image or cut & paste the text into another document. The world doesn’t end if there’s a pixel out of place.