LONG Beach, California -- Wired Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson announced at the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference on Friday that the publication would be releasing its content for the iPad by summer.
The first iPads are expected to be available at the end of March. TED attendees got a demonstration -- on what looked like a supersized iPad -- of how their future reading experience would look with the March issue of Wired magazine.
"I'm from the media world," Anderson told the audience "and as you may have heard, we have lots of questions about our future. The good news is I think we found part of the answer.... We think this is a game changer."
Anderson said the iPad allows periodicals for the first time to do digital content with all of the same values and artistic range that are the hallmark of print magazines. Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich worked with Jeremy Clark from Adobe (above) over the last six months to design the Wired iPad Magazine.
Aside from a technical glitch that halted the demo at one point, Clark moved smoothly through pages, horizontally and vertically. Readers can sift through the contents horizontally and when they find an article they want to read, touch and drag their finger on the first page vertically to browse through the pages up and down. They can also turn the device horizontally to take advantage of the automatically-rotating display to view two pages side by side like a magazine and zoom out to see thumbnails of the content all at once.
The device allows for integrated media so readers can read a product review and touch a photo to jump into a video of the product. Advertisements can also be interactive. Clark touched a Camaro ad to flip the car around 360 degrees.
Among the other advantages: Wired magazine print readers pay $40 in Canada and a whopping $70 for other international addresses. Anderson said nothing of pricing, but a digital subscription would likely be considerably less.
Photo TED / James Duncan Davidson
