Surfergirl magazine is available for free on issuu. Here’s the link. I like Surfer Girl and what I regret most about it is that it didn’t exist when I was 15 years old. It or a windsurfing equivalent. It used to come free with Carve quarterly and now it’s free on its own a few times a year. It’s far, far better than any of the other glossies.
When I was 15, the choice was Jackie or Marie Claire. Jackie is gone and I read Marie Claire at the dentist/doctor/beauticians only.
I’m having a breeze around issuu. I can’t help feeling there are more interesting things there to be found. And what I like about issuu (as opposed to pixelmags) is you can read it on a normal browser on a PC. Currently the pixelmags stuff is limited to iPhone (sucks to read a magazine on) and iPad which I won’t buy because frankly Apple products suck in my experience.
Thing is, I’d be good to buy magazines on a decent reader that didn’t cost 600E. I mean, yesterday I bought three and okay so one of them was unusual (Woodturning magazine because one of my photographs is in it) but I do buy a lot of magazines.
In the last month or so I have bought Advanced Photoshop, Photoshop Creative, Cooler, Surfgirl, Digital Arts, Digital Artists and only for the fact tha tI would truly bankrupt myself, I’d buy more. And I don’t have space to keep these things. Ideally it’d be nice if I could just download them into a bunch of nicely organised pdfs in a magazine reading library but that’s not really happening.
For now, however, though, I find something like issuu and it’s nice to wander around.
I was thinking this morning – I can’t remember why – that the music industry modus operandi is now broken. We don’t really need the big labels any more because we’ve a reasonably standard data format, artists can actually record studio quality albums at the sort of cost that you could only dream baout 10 years ago and the whole marketing platform has changed a lot. I don’t think the music industry has worked out just how broken it is, and how irrelevant the big labels are. I mean, I mostly pick up obscure music like Xavier Rudd from youtube videos, or extreme sports videos or the like. I listen to radio from all over the world and yet the record labels spend their time throttling promotional tools like last.fm. I bought loads of music as a result of last.fm recommendations.
These tools can be and are being leveraged by independent artists and small labels.
The publishing industry is heading for a similar change. I’m in the process of (early process of) assembling a photography book. It’s inspired by the great coffee table books that I have seen other people produce – I actually look at these things possibly because I am a photographer – but the point is – technology allows me to do this now and cut out a publisher if I want, or market it myself (which is going to be the hard part). Book publishers, to me, look to be understanding how technology can be leveraged to affect them although they’re slow on the technology uptake – I mean compare the iPad to any of the other e-readers. Black and white only – for crying out loud. Whose dumb idea was that when we have colour on phones for chrissake.
Magazines are going the same way – but you can see that some of the publishers have woken up to this. Advanced Photoshop and Photoshop Creative and the entire imagine publishing collection is available through pixelmags which is terrific apart from the fact that the last time I checked they didn’t really have a PC friendly interface which is essential in part because people like me won’t be buying an iPad if there’s a chance that a Windows friendly netbook will come along and do likewise for me via a browser. And obviously any of the ones on issuu are even faster on the uptake – and issuu make it possible for people like me to do stuff like this.
Meanwhile, you don’t have to be from Hawaii to read specialist sports magazines. I’d've taken surf at the age of 15 – I always loved surf and windsurf imagery and that’s why you buy these things (it’s not necessarily for the writing) but there are so many possibilities opened up by it being possible to get all these things, instantly.
It’s just amazine.
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