

Last week Jeremy Clark from Adobe and I unveiled the first glimpse of the Wired Reader at TED. Above, you’ll see a video, narrated by Jeremy and Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich, who led our tablet team, that shows more. It explains why the tablet is such a groundbreaking opportunity for magazines such as ours.

What Jeremy and I showed was not a CGI demo or concept — it was running live code with real copy. The content was created in Adobe InDesign, as is the case for the print magazine, with the same designers adding interactive elements, from photo galleries and video to animations, along with adapting the designs so it looks great in both portrait and landscape orientation. This is a departure from the usual web model, where a different team repurposes magazine content into HTML, unavoidably losing much of the visual context in the process. Wired.com is not a re-purposed version of the magazine, but rather an separately-produced news service.

Although the Wired Reader starts as an AIR app, Adobe has created tools that allow us to easily convert it for major tablet and mobile platforms. In Barcelona this week, Adobe announced that AIR would run on Android, and Adobe has already announced its Packager for iPhone tool that will allow Flash apps (including AIR) to run on Apple mobile platforms. And AIR already runs natively on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems.

But enough of the technical details. The point here is that we are entering a new era of media, where we finally have a digital platform that allows us to retain all the rich visual features of high-gloss print, from lavish design to glorious photography, while augmenting it with video, animations, additional content and full interactivity. We’re one of the first magazines to go beyond the concept stage with this, and the demo we showed at TED and in the above video reflects months of real tablet production as we prepare to go live this summer.

Much is still to be answered about magazines and other media on this emerging class of devices, from the business and distribution models to the consumer response. But what is already clear is that they offer the opportunity to be beautiful, highly engaging and immersive, going beyond what’s available on the web. I think tablets are going to sell like hotcakes, in part because they offer such an intimate, rich media experience. We’re betting big on them, as you can see, but this is just a taste. Stay tuned for a full release this summer.

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