EDN has launched a tablet edition of the publication. Whilst many consumer publications have successfully adopted tablet formats, publications for electronics design engineers have been slow to make the move to iPad and Android, and typically have relied on browser-based digital editions.
The tablet version of EDN certainly looks nice. It’s laid out specifically for reading on a tablet (only in landscape orientation), with decent-sized text, and intuitive scrolling to read the full story: it’s certainly a much more pleasant experience than browsing websites or using a web-based digital publication on an iPad or Android tablet.
Like most digital publications, the magazine is available to anyone to download. I think this will be one of the potential challenges for digital magazines: whilst advertisers seem happy to accept any traffic as being relevant to them when placing display ads on websites, many still expect audited circulations for magazines. With no restrictions to who can subscribe, EDN won’t be able to gather the same demographics about readers of the tablet edition, and it remains to be seen how advertisers respond to this situation.
Overall, however, this is a very positive move by EDN, and the quality of the tablet edition reflects the experience UBM has build in digital publishing. I will be reading EDN on a tablet from now on: hopefully many other engineers will also do the same.