Tam Harbert

Many of my stories are both printed in a magazine and posted on the Web. I’ve always asked editors to send me issues of the magazines, so I have hard-copy clips of my work to show potential clients. But as print disappears, more and more of my stories live solely on the Web. Rather than final, tangible pieces that can be permanently collected in order to show my best writing, my stories have become ethereal sets of ones and zeros that can disappear in an instant. Recently, that’s exactly what a bunch of them did.

A client of mine was bought by another publishing company early this year. My editor warned me a few weeks ago that the publication would be transitioning to a new Web platform and that my stories would be temporarily inaccessible. I thought it would take maybe a couple of days. It’s been at least two weeks now, and my stories – hundreds of them – are nowhere to be found. They aren’t on the client’s site; they aren’t on the Web. I wouldn’t be worried, except that this particular client has no “print edition.” My stories existed only on the Web. Now, when potential clients click these links on my website, they are sent to a page that says the story was not found.

My stories are gone. And I’m not sure when they’ll be back.

Meanwhile, another client gated its website and started charging a subscription for its online version. I’m not sure how long ago it did this – it didn’t tell me – so I don’t know how many of my potential customers clicked on a link, only to get a pitch to sign up for a subscription rather than my story.

A third client nearly disappeared entirely, taking my stories along with it. It was going out of business, but ended up being saved at the eleventh hour.

Of course, I’ve removed these bad links from my website. I’m hoping to have at least some of them back up soon. But the experience has taught me to grab a copy of my stories as soon as they are published on the Web, because their existence is tenuous. And yet, a copy pulled off the Web doesn’t seem as professional, or even legitimate, as a printed clip or a PDF of a magazine layout. The purpose of traditional clips was two-fold. They not only showed samples of the writer’s work, but also proved that the writer had been published by a reputable news or literary organization. A collection of clips was permanent; a collection of clicks is ephemeral. As the paper age of publishing disappears, writers need to figure out how to preserve their published work.

Very little of what I write actually gets printed on paper anymore. Most people read my stories online. But most publishers – magazine publishers especially – haven’t adjusted well to digital. The visual presentation is boring, often awkward and sometimes downright ugly. The text is hard to read. A beautiful two-page spread from a major magazine feature gets stripped of its best design elements online. It just stands there, naked.

It’s not all the publishers’ fault. So far, no technology has been able to do justice to the beauty and class of glossy magazine articles. Three weeks ago, I was skeptical about the future of digital magazines . But in the course of reporting a story on e-readers, I’ve learned about recent developments in both publishing and technology that could bring magazines fully into the digital age.

First, e-readers are catching on fast. There are about 50 e-readers on the market today. Semiconductor companies, excited by the potential, are jumping into the market with chips that offer faster speeds and more functions at lower costs. These chips will enable new e-reader makers to enter the market. The drop in electronics cost combined with the increased competition could cut the price of an e-reader – the least expensive of which is about $250 today – to less than $100 by year end. To differentiate themselves, e-reader vendors are experimenting with designs, including a hinged reader that would open up like a magazine, according to Gregg Burke, manager of the e-book business line of chips recently introduced by Texas Instruments. He thinks such a product could be on the market by December 2010.

The displays are still limited to black and white, but some promising color technologies are on the horizon. Jennifer Colegrove, director of display technologies at consultant DisplaySearch, says that within five years, rich, full-color e-magazines could be common.

Second, publishers seem to be finally loosening their death grip on the old print model and rethinking how to sell their product in digital form, taking a cue from Amazon’s Kindle and its digital newsstand, which offers dozens of magazines, including Time, Forbes and Fortune. Hearst Corp. recently launched Skiff, a digital magazine and newspaper service for e-readers. And in December, a consortium of publishers, including Time Inc., Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst and News Corp., announced a joint venture to create a digital storefront for their magazines.

Independent companies also are trying to make a business out of distributing digital magazines. Zinio claims to be the largest digital newsstand in the world, offering 1,900 consumer magazine titles.

The big question is whether publishers can and will design their content for multi-dimensional digital media rather than plain old analog paper. After all, why would I pay $3 a week for a digital subscription to Forbes when I can already read it on my PC for free? Several reasons:

• It’s hard work to read a long magazine article on a PC. All that scrolling and jumping through pages. Plus the text is hard to read, at least for middle-aged eyes. Take one look at the crisp display of an e-reader and you’ll immediately appreciate the difference.

• I want to read that magazine at the dinner table, in bed or on the subway – NOT at my desk when I’ve got more important stuff to do.

• I get articles with beautiful color and layouts, articles that are presented even more attractively online than on glossy paper.

• I get interactive features that are fun, useful and informative. Clicking on a photo of baseball star Manny Ramirez, for example, might reveal a list of his stats.

Technology is already delivering on the first two points, but that won’t be enough. As for the last two, the next year will be critical. I hope the technology to present rich color develops quickly. I hope magazine publishers invest the time, money and effort to get it right. (To get a sense of how magazines could develop, see this video from Swiss media company Bonnier AB.)

Magazines just might survive. I plan to buy an e-reader so I’ll have a front-row seat to watch.

Fortune magazine’s March 1 cover story, “The Future of Reading,”  is an interesting and well-written piece reviewing the quandary that magazine publishers have been in since the birth of the Internet. Author Josh Quittner argues that the new tablet computer from Apple could be the launch, uh, pad that magazines can use to save themselves from extinction.

He tells how his 12-year-old fashionista daughter scours issues of Vogue, then saves and categorizes photos and information she finds there. She’s frustrated, however, by all the work and manual cross-referencing it takes when she wants to, for example, match the right shoes with the right dress.

The tablet and its web browser, he implies, lets publishers solve that problem and offers promise for a new breed of digital magazine.

“Raised to expect instant, sortable, searchable, savable, portable access to all the information in the world, these digital natives — tomorrow’s magazine subscribers, God and Steve Jobs willing — could well become the generation that saves the publishing industry,” Quittner writes.

Maybe. Although it opens on a hopeful note, the article delivers few concrete reasons to believe its premise. What Quittner seems to have in mind sounds more like a mini-Google, focused on a narrow interest like fashion for pre-teens, than the magazine form that I still love and hope somehow survives. I relish the long, creatively written feature article that comes nicely packaged with beautiful photos, artful illustrations and enlightening sidebars. While print newspapers have lost their appeal for me, I still subscribe to several magazines. I skim through them quickly when they arrive and note the articles that I look forward to reading later, in my leisure time. These are the type of deep-dive information packages for which print magazines used to have more space and readers longer attention spans.

Quittner pines for that, too, saying that many people still “crave deep reading experiences.” They do, indeed. But I haven’t seen a computer nor a web publisher that can create those deep reading experiences. I want a hinged e-reader that would open like a book or magazine to two 8-by-11-inch screens. It would be light enough to carry on the subway or take to bed and rest on my lap. I could use it to browse the websites of my favorite magazines (to which I would gladly subscribe) and download the articles I want to read. These stories would be displayed in beautiful layouts with photos and illustrations. There would be the traditional sidebars, but also interactive, multimedia boxes that provide video or audio clips.

Quittner’s point – that the size and shape of the device is a  key to enabling profitable publishing of digital magazines – is right on. The iPad may be a start in the right direction, but it’s not there yet. A slate that retains the attributes readers love about their “dead tree” magazines while using the web to make them even better. That’s what might save the magazine business.