Bonnier Releases Another Tablet Magazine Demo

Suddenly tablet versions of magazines are everywhere.

You see them in the pages of the New York Times or linked across numerous gadget- and media-related websites. Sports Illustrated made one. So did Wired. In fact, the publishers of those titles—Time Inc. and Condé Nast, respectively—have even teamed up with Hearst, Meredith, and News Corp., to create a digital storefront to sell these awesome, interactive publications and develop a standard architecture for this exciting new approach to publishing.

The only place you don't see tablet versions of magazines is in real life since, as of today, they don't actually exist.

Oh, well. The continued nonexistence of viable tablet computers—wither Crunch Pad; Where are you, Apple Tablet?—notwithstanding, publishers continue to offer proofs of concept for tablet magazines. The latest comes from Bonnier, publishers of titles like Baby Talk, Field & Stream, Popular Photography, and Yachting, among many others, has released its own video of a tablet magazine prototype. (This comes via paidContent's Robert Andrews.)

What's impressive about Bonnier's fantasy device is the way the video shows it in the real world. No Sims hands navigating a virtual device as in SI's tablet demo: Watching the video, which shows a Kindle-like device with a full-color screen and easy-to-navigate menus, you get a real sense of how the device might be used as a human reader scans it on his nightstand, skims it at breakfast, and reads it on a rain-slicked street. (If Bonnier wanted to really impress its readers, it would show someone reading a tablet while hunting, yachting, or changing a baby to cross-promote the company's niche titles.)

Of course, parsing how one imaginary device beats another imaginary device is kind of like saying the creatures in Avatar look more real than Smurfs: They're both still fake. We'll see real proof of the concept when we can handle these things and play with them.

The tablets. Not the Smurfs.