I love the smell of papers.
The early morning newspapers delivered to my doorstep smells of the fresh printing ink used for the past twenty years. Every new John Grisham or Dan Brown still provides the familiar escapism into the world of fiction, much like what Harry Potter did for my kids.
When the Internet boom came, the doomsayers predicted the end of print, which, for a paper marketer, didn’t sound like good business to me. I confessed to be one of the rare few who were secretly happy when the dotcom balloon burst – the end of print is after all not going to happen.
Recently I jumped onto the trending bandwagon and became an iPad user. By using a free app named flipboard, I became an instant designer and a publisher by producing my online magazine in under 5 minutes time.
Chances are, your online hours are spent on consuming content that is relevant to you. Such as checking your Facebook friends’ activities and the tweets of the people that matter. Add in speed-reading RSS feeds of online news portals, and shifting through blogs for updates. Along the way you acquire more Facebook friends, and follow more tweets. Your online time increases and your Internet browser’s bookmark folder swells daily while your RSS reader consistently flags new alerts.
Too much to read and too little time – that is the madness of the digital lifestyle.
What Flipboard on iPad did was to convert all my daily digital content into a magazine which is exclusively mine. Suddenly Twitter is no longer a 140-word love affair with an embedded tiny URL link, but every tweet is expanded into a few paragraphs with nice photos. Facebook posts, RSS feeds, blog updates, and all the incoming information is re-layout as magazine pages, providing an enjoyable reading experience, updated on the fly wherever I go, even in the traffic jams of mumbai. More than that, I could reply or retweet, or even “like” my friend’s status on facebook.
What I “flipboard” through everyday now on ipad are exactly the things I want to read, filtered nicely into sections, designed nicely for fast reading. As I enjoy the new reading pleasure I can’t help but to think of the future of publishing and design.
I am deriving the pleasure of having full control over what i read, aggregated from multiple sources, stripped away from their original sites, together with the advertising which traditional publishers rely on to survive. So much for eyeballs and click-throughs.
As the Flipboard generates pages of refreshed content in its proprietary layout template, I also ponder upon the elimination of the designers who worked on the original websites – I am reading news from New York Times without having to visit nyt.com.
Most crucially, i am the chief curator of the hybrid nature of content, from informal Facebook wall posts, instant news feeds to critical essays on designobserver.com.
My magazine. My design. My content. Exclusively mine. I am beginning to believe this is the moment to rethink where design and publishing is heading while I am enjoying the sneak preview.
