A few years ago we produced six issues of a free, downloadable magazine (as a PDF file) that we titled Sub Rosa. Each of those releases was downloaded by about 10,000 people – so I’m assuming we did a pretty good job. However, the time investment was significant and, being a free magazine, there was little return on that investment…so it fell by the wayside unfortunately.
One of the drawbacks of a PDF magazine was that people had to be sitting at their computer to read it. However, with the release of the iPad it occurred to me that Sub Rosa would work pretty well as a ‘tablet’ magazine – so last week I dropped into the local Apple store and downloaded an issue to take a look. I only opened it using Safari – so it did struggle a little with the flow of the magazine and image manipulation – but it still looked great. I’d imagine it would work much better in a dedicated PDF reader such as GoodReader (note though I haven’t tested it). Check it out (and hang in there for the zoomable Alex Grey eye-candy):
So, if you have yourself an iPad, head on over to the Sub Rosa website and download all six issues. Makes me wonder whether this might be something worth looking at again in the next few years as touch tablet devices become more ubiquitous.
