but you honestly couldn't think of a worst topic to demo their concept. For things like that people just want the information and they want it discretely.
Terrible and the last thing publishing needs - your article costs just went through the roof. One minute you need a writer and some college person to layout - now you need a full 3D movie, visual effects, ui artists, programmers on and on.
Rubbish!
Mmmm... what if the content were an ad, say for a BMW?
There are no tools for the current HTML4 either. Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG is useless for anything except the most rudimentary of web pages. Forget about anything dynamic like Ajax. In my opinion the most important part for web dev shops is good php, asp, rails, sql chops because anything remotely complex is going to require it.
True, I don't think its about soup to nuts tools. We'll probably never see that again.
But the reason Flash is so ubiquitous is that there are easy to use tools for it and they allow creatives to produce discrete pieces of work without needing deep technical knowledge. Until similar tools are developed that allow some kind of chunking of work using HTML5, CSS3, & JS, Flash cannot not disappear. I think Apple and others are working on it, but while the tools Apple produces might be nice and influential, they are unlikely to be adequate only for limited applications.
In one of the videos it mentions use of post production to do most of the video effects.
You could use something like Maya or Blender 3D to the 3D manipulations and animations.
I believe you could do most of this with the Motion and Final Cut components of FCS.
For the interactive text scrolling (at whatever angle) this can easily be done within the iPhone/iPad SDK and the simulator.
The text is merely on a transparent upper layer which can recognize and react to touches while a video plays on an underlying layer. For example, the app gets callbacks from a scroll touch-- it needs to scroll text at an angle so it simply computes the angle and adjusts the position of the transparent layer to compensate.
The key here, is that magazine is read, and interacted with, on the device without the use of Flash.
*
I get it. But the way people toss about the terms "easily done" cracks me up. Nothing about this is easy. Or inexpensive. For a subscription, I think you need a template App that receives the latest publication, not a brand new App for each release. Something this complex is just not practical for a magazine to consider for repeat issues. The whole thing is a stunt.
What is so specific about that that couldn't have been done before? I mean, it looks like your average flash demo after all. What makes tablets unique is the use of touch and fingers, not just for pressing here and there once but actively interacting with the content. This just doesn't look new.
The [semi] unique thing was that the still pictures in the magazine had limited movement to provide interest and enhance the content. Much like Ken Burns used panning and zooming of photographs to create award winning videos.
There are several ways to deal with still images:
1) Ken Burns effect
2) Separate into layers, and move a camera though the layers
3) generate intermediate images (tweening)
Here, the creators used a special camera that allowed a [relatively] small amount of movement to be shot at a very high quality and a very high frame-rate video. Then, the were able to playback at a lower frame-rate to give the effect of a picture that moved (rather than a video).
But the reason Flash is so ubiquitous is that there are easy to use tools for it and they allow creatives to produce discrete pieces of work without needing deep technical knowledge.
Which is one big reason Flash is getting so much bad press. The creatives don't know jack about programming and hence the applications they publish are not optimized at all, causing major discontent among end users.
True, but at some point they will want to share there opinion about what they read and that is where the internet shines. Now we can shout to a larger more focused audience than you would at your local beatnik corner or your Dear Abby column. Plus, you wouldn't think this but people are starting to actually fallow through and experience physical face time with things like conventions, retreats, and seminars.
Exactly my point. Newer communication forms don't replace, they glom on and add to the experience. But intrinsically people seek appropriate experiences for the situation and these tend to parallel the form. So the add ons need to be in line with and appropriate to the experience of that form.
I like the Dear Abby thing --chat/blog/tweets can go with that. Its an environment that can be noisy.
Readers also write in to magazines but this needs to be a bit more thoughtful, or it just becomes noise. They typically are more like a conversation and are edited for relevance, etc. Part of this is the form influencing the experience, but people also seek the form that fits with the experience they desire.
So the form influences the experience influences the form. Since the form is evolving rather than being replaced, they need to respect the existing experience (although radically new ones may also come about too -- different form, different audience different experience.)
Which is one big reason Flash is getting so much bad press. The creatives don't know jack about programming and hence the applications they publish are not optimized at all, causing major discontent among end users.
Spoken like a programmer.
Its a team thing content, looks, function, strategy. If any one sucks, they all suck. Frankly not too many programmers are very good at any of the other three.
And how can a designer screw up stop motion animation? Is that a programming task?
By the way, it used to be that you had to have a programmer do markup for page layout of books. Do you think that's the way it should be?
Nice concept, but there isn't a magazine in the world that could afford this treatment, except maybe for a special issue, but I doubt anyone could see a fair ROI on this. We've been doing motion work for magazines for about the last year or so and let me tell you budgets are tight, the print world simply isn't ready to spend the money for something like this. There are so many impracticalities, I wouldn't waste my time pitching it unless I knew the client wanted to "go huge" and probably lose some money and I no one wants to be the one in charge of a money losing project. Could be use in advertising, though budgets are being cut there as well.
But, what if the content were an ad. and the ad were to appear in several magazines?
That would change the economics.
Also these techniques could be applied to existing content (text and images) without the need for a shoot involving actors, photographers, etc.
You could take a client with an existing portfolio of [ad] content and a limited budget and put together a compelling presentation using post production, alone.
Good points about the friction from "interactive" cut scenes. They do look like the interactive CD stuff from the 90s.
But I disagree that the primary purposed of digital content ought to be to enable comments. If that's the case, you don't really need "content" at all, beyond a few lines of deliberately provocative text.
Of course, that may be what you're championing, but a culture of nothing but crude provocations serving as the stimulus for a bunch of Twitter level yammering is a culture well on its way to collapse. A complete democracy of voices is just white noise.
I'm a little worried that we seem to be confronting a generation who thinks more than a few seconds of anything but pandering to their inflated sense of incipient fame is "boring" and "a waste of time."
All cultures have been moving toward some kind of online digital democracy which is a nightmare for politicians where every voice that chimes in has equal weight and it is nearly impossible to tell professionals from clever amateurs from paranoid loons. It certainly requires more filtering and fact-checking on the part of people participating.
A truly interesting display of what's possible on the iPad, but with an equally in-your-face choice of subject-matter. With the recent purging of overtly sensual content from the App Store, one can only wonder how a subject like this would be treated in the approval process.
Here is my "I see the big picture and am smarter than everyone else" point of view (s/c):
1_ Some here are getting types of media confused -- you cannot compare this to WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, or even People Magazine -- this would not be that type of reading material. To me if a publication was to do something like this it would fit perfectly with Neo noir or Graphic Novels. It is a niche market, but a successful niche market where I think buyers will be willing to pay more for a 'living' graphic novel. Also, maybe a Travel book or some Nature type book would be successful, imagine they show you live travel spots in China - Great Wall, Yangtze River, Tiananmen Square, etc and you can read about each place and where to go. Or National Geographic could do wonders with this format. Etc.
2_ As for cost, as I said above if marketed to niche markets and/or as a 'plus' version to a magazine or book (ex. National Geographic Plus, Tour Beijing Plus, etc.) I think people will pay more and that would justify the production cost.
3_ I am also curious how this will be done if not using Flash, is it just a mp4 or QuickTime movie, or is it a mixture of those with HTML5? My guess is to get the interactivity its an HTML5 and mp4 video mix.
I think this is really cool and will help push for even more experimentation and out of the box thinking.
Here is my "I see the big picture and am smarter than everyone else" point of view (s/c):
1_ Some here are getting types of media confused -- you cannot compare this to WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, or even People Magazine -- this would not be that type of reading material. To me if a publication was to do something like this it would fit perfectly with Neo noir or Graphic Novels. It is a niche market, but a successful niche market where I think buyers will be willing to pay more for a 'living' graphic novel. Also, maybe a Travel book or some Nature type book would be successful, imagine they show you live travel spots in China - Great Wall, Yangtze River, Tiananmen Square, etc and you can read about each place and where to go. Or National Geographic could do wonders with this format. Etc.
2_ As for cost, as I said above if marketed to niche markets and/or as a 'plus' version to a magazine or book (ex. National Geographic Plus, Tour Beijing Plus, etc.) I think people will pay more and that would justify the production cost.
3_ I am also curious how this will be done if not using Flash, is it just a mp4 or QuickTime movie, or is it a mixture of those with HTML5? My guess is to get the interactivity its an HTML5 and mp4 video mix.
I think this is really cool and will help push for even more experimentation and out of the box thinking.
My 2cents.
:later.
To do this on the web, you would use HTML5 or Flash.
Off the top of my head, to do this on an iPad, you probably would write a generalized skeleton app that downloaded the content (text, images, video) along with a procedure that the skeleton app would use to create the desired presentation and interaction for this content.
For the next issue, the skeleton app would download the new content and procedure and create the new presentation.
You could consider this as processes similar to creating and presenting a Flash file.
However the iPad solution would be streamlined, low-overhead, high-performance, using only those features that make sense to the device, content and application at hand.
This is not without precedent as there are several iPhone apps that use this approach for games, etc.
Speaking of which, who here is a pro with HTML5 and CSS? What tools on the Mac are recommended for beginners wanting to create interactive content suitable for iPad consumption?
Start with Flux which was designed for XHTML but is moving towards supporting HTML5 as well.
-video with a transparent background, text and animation passing behind video
-Video with cue points, certain points in video triggering animation
-Rendered, non standard fonts displayed at an angle
-Ambient sound running seperate from the video, being triggered by events in the video
For straight video clips Flash is not needed and HTML5 is the only way. For something like this though, you need some kind of plug-in (Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime). I'd like to be proven wrong, but I don't think HTML5 is there yet....
You rotate the DIV in CSS. It can be done and there are tutorials on how to do it if you use Google because that's how I found them.
That's cool, but it's still a non-rendered plan system font... There also all the other bullets I listed... Again, I'm psyched for HTML5, but I've still seen nothing as media rich as what you can do in flash.... Again, if there are good links id love to see them....
It's really interesting to read the reactions to the demo; some of them quite negative. A very important issue to consider is that the video clip does not in any way give us a good sense of what it's like to read a magazine like this on an iPad. This was a video clip, which makes everything look way more dynamic than it would be if you actually read the magazine. So I reserve judgement about how this style would work with a device that you hold in your lap and flip pages every few minutes. The sum of the experience is a function of the video elements, the film noir style or whatever style is used, and the tone that's conveyed through the words on the page.
That's cool, but it's still a non-rendered plan system font... There also all the other bullets I listed... Again, I'm psyched for HTML5, but I've still seen nothing as media rich as what you can do in flash.... Again, if there are good links id love to see them....
There isn't, and even if there was there would still be no development kit to make it as easy to create as with Flash. When it finally does best Flash in every aspect, if ever, it will be a very long time now. HTML10 and CSS12? Who knows, but that isn't really the point of the real issues with Flash, namely: Flash is still not efficient and effective on mobile devices with limited battery life and the HTML5 video tag is so much more efficient than Flash for delivering video that even when Flash 10.1 gets released for all Android phones it still won't likely be the primary method for delivering video in the future.
It looks great but it would be a booger to read. It strikes me more like what I expected DVD menu screens to be than how I would want to read a magazine. For short reads it might be fine but I hope I don't have to go through all of that to pick up where I left off on page 68.
This is new medium somewhat, a bit of a hybrid. It will take a bit to figure out what the best way to communicate with it is. Kudos to the creators for making the rest of us think though. From a practical side that's a lot of time/money in production to spend on 10 or so pages in a magazine.
Yes, but there is time and money to save on materials and printing process, delivering paper media to readers... and those savings can translate into this new presentation approach. All of those clips don't really look like something that takes more than 5 minutes to film (OK, an hour with makeup and costume changes) and don't require expensive actors to feature (though I would not be surprised to see a big name or two in some cases, should this really comes to life).
On the other hand, all this "live action" does distract from actual reading... but that is us, people used to dead letters and still images on paper or screen. It is like my parents' generation cant get video games - they were already too old when video gaming became mainstream. Likewise, we might be too old for some new things that will be commonly accepted among today's kids.
Yes, but there is time and money to save on materials and printing process, delivering paper media to readers... and those savings can translate into this new presentation approach. All of those clips don't really look like something that takes more than 5 minutes to film (OK, an hour with makeup and costume changes) and don't require expensive actors to feature (though I would not be surprised to see a big name or two in some cases, should this really comes to life).
On the other hand, all this "live action" does distract from actual reading... but that is us, people used to dead letters and still images on paper or screen. It is like my parents' generation cant get video games - they were already too old when video gaming became mainstream. Likewise, we might be too old for some new things that will be commonly accepted among today's kids.
I second this sentiment. I'm in publishing and everyday I see how wasteful we can be producing even a single 1-color title due to bottleneck workflow practices. I welcome the iPad and these new digital content-interactive approaches. Certainly producing this new type of e-content will require new and better trained staff to pull this off. It's very likely expensive to start producing interactive ebooks/ezines, but like everything thing else, once you get the hang of it you can learn ways to reduce cost.
Honestly, damn if you do and damn if you don't because a lot of people already lost their jobs in publishing. I say there is no better time to learn something new and rethink what it means to read a book or magazine.
Comments
Maybe for childrens educational books...
but you honestly couldn't think of a worst topic to demo their concept. For things like that people just want the information and they want it discretely.
Terrible and the last thing publishing needs - your article costs just went through the roof. One minute you need a writer and some college person to layout - now you need a full 3D movie, visual effects, ui artists, programmers on and on.
Rubbish!
Mmmm... what if the content were an ad, say for a BMW?
*
There are no tools for the current HTML4 either. Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG is useless for anything except the most rudimentary of web pages. Forget about anything dynamic like Ajax. In my opinion the most important part for web dev shops is good php, asp, rails, sql chops because anything remotely complex is going to require it.
True, I don't think its about soup to nuts tools. We'll probably never see that again.
But the reason Flash is so ubiquitous is that there are easy to use tools for it and they allow creatives to produce discrete pieces of work without needing deep technical knowledge. Until similar tools are developed that allow some kind of chunking of work using HTML5, CSS3, & JS, Flash cannot not disappear. I think Apple and others are working on it, but while the tools Apple produces might be nice and influential, they are unlikely to be adequate only for limited applications.
In one of the videos it mentions use of post production to do most of the video effects.
You could use something like Maya or Blender 3D to the 3D manipulations and animations.
I believe you could do most of this with the Motion and Final Cut components of FCS.
For the interactive text scrolling (at whatever angle) this can easily be done within the iPhone/iPad SDK and the simulator.
The text is merely on a transparent upper layer which can recognize and react to touches while a video plays on an underlying layer. For example, the app gets callbacks from a scroll touch-- it needs to scroll text at an angle so it simply computes the angle and adjusts the position of the transparent layer to compensate.
The key here, is that magazine is read, and interacted with, on the device without the use of Flash.
*
I get it. But the way people toss about the terms "easily done" cracks me up. Nothing about this is easy. Or inexpensive. For a subscription, I think you need a template App that receives the latest publication, not a brand new App for each release. Something this complex is just not practical for a magazine to consider for repeat issues. The whole thing is a stunt.
What is so specific about that that couldn't have been done before? I mean, it looks like your average flash demo after all. What makes tablets unique is the use of touch and fingers, not just for pressing here and there once but actively interacting with the content. This just doesn't look new.
The [semi] unique thing was that the still pictures in the magazine had limited movement to provide interest and enhance the content. Much like Ken Burns used panning and zooming of photographs to create award winning videos.
There are several ways to deal with still images:
1) Ken Burns effect
2) Separate into layers, and move a camera though the layers
3) generate intermediate images (tweening)
Here, the creators used a special camera that allowed a [relatively] small amount of movement to be shot at a very high quality and a very high frame-rate video. Then, the were able to playback at a lower frame-rate to give the effect of a picture that moved (rather than a video).
*
But the reason Flash is so ubiquitous is that there are easy to use tools for it and they allow creatives to produce discrete pieces of work without needing deep technical knowledge.
Which is one big reason Flash is getting so much bad press. The creatives don't know jack about programming and hence the applications they publish are not optimized at all, causing major discontent among end users.
True, but at some point they will want to share there opinion about what they read and that is where the internet shines. Now we can shout to a larger more focused audience than you would at your local beatnik corner or your Dear Abby column. Plus, you wouldn't think this but people are starting to actually fallow through and experience physical face time with things like conventions, retreats, and seminars.
Exactly my point. Newer communication forms don't replace, they glom on and add to the experience. But intrinsically people seek appropriate experiences for the situation and these tend to parallel the form. So the add ons need to be in line with and appropriate to the experience of that form.
I like the Dear Abby thing --chat/blog/tweets can go with that. Its an environment that can be noisy.
Readers also write in to magazines but this needs to be a bit more thoughtful, or it just becomes noise. They typically are more like a conversation and are edited for relevance, etc. Part of this is the form influencing the experience, but people also seek the form that fits with the experience they desire.
So the form influences the experience influences the form. Since the form is evolving rather than being replaced, they need to respect the existing experience (although radically new ones may also come about too -- different form, different audience different experience.)
Which is one big reason Flash is getting so much bad press. The creatives don't know jack about programming and hence the applications they publish are not optimized at all, causing major discontent among end users.
Spoken like a programmer.
Its a team thing content, looks, function, strategy. If any one sucks, they all suck. Frankly not too many programmers are very good at any of the other three.
And how can a designer screw up stop motion animation? Is that a programming task?
By the way, it used to be that you had to have a programmer do markup for page layout of books. Do you think that's the way it should be?
Nice concept, but there isn't a magazine in the world that could afford this treatment, except maybe for a special issue, but I doubt anyone could see a fair ROI on this. We've been doing motion work for magazines for about the last year or so and let me tell you budgets are tight, the print world simply isn't ready to spend the money for something like this. There are so many impracticalities, I wouldn't waste my time pitching it unless I knew the client wanted to "go huge" and probably lose some money and I no one wants to be the one in charge of a money losing project. Could be use in advertising, though budgets are being cut there as well.
But, what if the content were an ad. and the ad were to appear in several magazines?
That would change the economics.
Also these techniques could be applied to existing content (text and images) without the need for a shoot involving actors, photographers, etc.
You could take a client with an existing portfolio of [ad] content and a limited budget and put together a compelling presentation using post production, alone.
*
Good points about the friction from "interactive" cut scenes. They do look like the interactive CD stuff from the 90s.
But I disagree that the primary purposed of digital content ought to be to enable comments. If that's the case, you don't really need "content" at all, beyond a few lines of deliberately provocative text.
Of course, that may be what you're championing, but a culture of nothing but crude provocations serving as the stimulus for a bunch of Twitter level yammering is a culture well on its way to collapse. A complete democracy of voices is just white noise.
I'm a little worried that we seem to be confronting a generation who thinks more than a few seconds of anything but pandering to their inflated sense of incipient fame is "boring" and "a waste of time."
All cultures have been moving toward some kind of online digital democracy which is a nightmare for politicians where every voice that chimes in has equal weight and it is nearly impossible to tell professionals from clever amateurs from paranoid loons. It certainly requires more filtering and fact-checking on the part of people participating.
1_ Some here are getting types of media confused -- you cannot compare this to WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, or even People Magazine -- this would not be that type of reading material. To me if a publication was to do something like this it would fit perfectly with Neo noir or Graphic Novels. It is a niche market, but a successful niche market where I think buyers will be willing to pay more for a 'living' graphic novel. Also, maybe a Travel book or some Nature type book would be successful, imagine they show you live travel spots in China - Great Wall, Yangtze River, Tiananmen Square, etc and you can read about each place and where to go. Or National Geographic could do wonders with this format. Etc.
2_ As for cost, as I said above if marketed to niche markets and/or as a 'plus' version to a magazine or book (ex. National Geographic Plus, Tour Beijing Plus, etc.) I think people will pay more and that would justify the production cost.
3_ I am also curious how this will be done if not using Flash, is it just a mp4 or QuickTime movie, or is it a mixture of those with HTML5? My guess is to get the interactivity its an HTML5 and mp4 video mix.
I think this is really cool and will help push for even more experimentation and out of the box thinking.
My 2cents.
:later.
Here is my "I see the big picture and am smarter than everyone else" point of view (s/c)
1_ Some here are getting types of media confused -- you cannot compare this to WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, or even People Magazine -- this would not be that type of reading material. To me if a publication was to do something like this it would fit perfectly with Neo noir or Graphic Novels. It is a niche market, but a successful niche market where I think buyers will be willing to pay more for a 'living' graphic novel. Also, maybe a Travel book or some Nature type book would be successful, imagine they show you live travel spots in China - Great Wall, Yangtze River, Tiananmen Square, etc and you can read about each place and where to go. Or National Geographic could do wonders with this format. Etc.
2_ As for cost, as I said above if marketed to niche markets and/or as a 'plus' version to a magazine or book (ex. National Geographic Plus, Tour Beijing Plus, etc.) I think people will pay more and that would justify the production cost.
3_ I am also curious how this will be done if not using Flash, is it just a mp4 or QuickTime movie, or is it a mixture of those with HTML5? My guess is to get the interactivity its an HTML5 and mp4 video mix.
I think this is really cool and will help push for even more experimentation and out of the box thinking.
My 2cents.
:later.
To do this on the web, you would use HTML5 or Flash.
Off the top of my head, to do this on an iPad, you probably would write a generalized skeleton app that downloaded the content (text, images, video) along with a procedure that the skeleton app would use to create the desired presentation and interaction for this content.
For the next issue, the skeleton app would download the new content and procedure and create the new presentation.
You could consider this as processes similar to creating and presenting a Flash file.
However the iPad solution would be streamlined, low-overhead, high-performance, using only those features that make sense to the device, content and application at hand.
This is not without precedent as there are several iPhone apps that use this approach for games, etc.
*
Speaking of which, who here is a pro with HTML5 and CSS? What tools on the Mac are recommended for beginners wanting to create interactive content suitable for iPad consumption?
Start with Flux which was designed for XHTML but is moving towards supporting HTML5 as well.
http://www.theescapers.com
Of something like this? Show me an example.
-video with a transparent background, text and animation passing behind video
-Video with cue points, certain points in video triggering animation
-Rendered, non standard fonts displayed at an angle
-Ambient sound running seperate from the video, being triggered by events in the video
For straight video clips Flash is not needed and HTML5 is the only way. For something like this though, you need some kind of plug-in (Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime). I'd like to be proven wrong, but I don't think HTML5 is there yet....
You rotate the DIV in CSS. It can be done and there are tutorials on how to do it if you use Google because that's how I found them.
http://www.zachstronaut.com/posts/20...ox-webkit.html
Just as a basic example
You rotate the DIV in CSS. It can be done and there are tutorials on how to do it if you use Google because that's how I found them.
http://www.zachstronaut.com/posts/20...ox-webkit.html
Just as a basic example
Nice! Have not seen that before.
You rotate the DIV in CSS. It can be done and there are tutorials on how to do it if you use Google because that's how I found them.
http://www.zachstronaut.com/posts/20...ox-webkit.html
Just as a basic example
That's cool, but it's still a non-rendered plan system font... There also all the other bullets I listed... Again, I'm psyched for HTML5, but I've still seen nothing as media rich as what you can do in flash.... Again, if there are good links id love to see them....
That's cool, but it's still a non-rendered plan system font... There also all the other bullets I listed... Again, I'm psyched for HTML5, but I've still seen nothing as media rich as what you can do in flash.... Again, if there are good links id love to see them....
There isn't, and even if there was there would still be no development kit to make it as easy to create as with Flash. When it finally does best Flash in every aspect, if ever, it will be a very long time now. HTML10 and CSS12? Who knows, but that isn't really the point of the real issues with Flash, namely: Flash is still not efficient and effective on mobile devices with limited battery life and the HTML5 video tag is so much more efficient than Flash for delivering video that even when Flash 10.1 gets released for all Android phones it still won't likely be the primary method for delivering video in the future.
It looks great but it would be a booger to read. It strikes me more like what I expected DVD menu screens to be than how I would want to read a magazine. For short reads it might be fine but I hope I don't have to go through all of that to pick up where I left off on page 68.
This is new medium somewhat, a bit of a hybrid. It will take a bit to figure out what the best way to communicate with it is. Kudos to the creators for making the rest of us think though. From a practical side that's a lot of time/money in production to spend on 10 or so pages in a magazine.
Yes, but there is time and money to save on materials and printing process, delivering paper media to readers... and those savings can translate into this new presentation approach. All of those clips don't really look like something that takes more than 5 minutes to film (OK, an hour with makeup and costume changes) and don't require expensive actors to feature (though I would not be surprised to see a big name or two in some cases, should this really comes to life).
On the other hand, all this "live action" does distract from actual reading... but that is us, people used to dead letters and still images on paper or screen. It is like my parents' generation cant get video games - they were already too old when video gaming became mainstream. Likewise, we might be too old for some new things that will be commonly accepted among today's kids.
Yes, but there is time and money to save on materials and printing process, delivering paper media to readers... and those savings can translate into this new presentation approach. All of those clips don't really look like something that takes more than 5 minutes to film (OK, an hour with makeup and costume changes) and don't require expensive actors to feature (though I would not be surprised to see a big name or two in some cases, should this really comes to life).
On the other hand, all this "live action" does distract from actual reading... but that is us, people used to dead letters and still images on paper or screen. It is like my parents' generation cant get video games - they were already too old when video gaming became mainstream. Likewise, we might be too old for some new things that will be commonly accepted among today's kids.
I second this sentiment. I'm in publishing and everyday I see how wasteful we can be producing even a single 1-color title due to bottleneck workflow practices. I welcome the iPad and these new digital content-interactive approaches. Certainly producing this new type of e-content will require new and better trained staff to pull this off. It's very likely expensive to start producing interactive ebooks/ezines, but like everything thing else, once you get the hang of it you can learn ways to reduce cost.
Honestly, damn if you do and damn if you don't because a lot of people already lost their jobs in publishing. I say there is no better time to learn something new and rethink what it means to read a book or magazine.