The appearance of tablet media, especially iPad, in 2010 slowly but significantly replaced printed media hegemony as conventional reading media, including here in Indonesia. For newspaper, this evolution was started earlier by optimizing access of Kompas Cetak for iPad. The evolution doesn’t stop here, developers saw opportunity niche to digitalized magazine to tablet media. You don’t need to go to magazine stand or subscribe to it every month. As predicted, at least two magazine applications on iPad, Scoop, and Magazine (from Kompas Gramedia Groups) received warm welcome.

Majalah application published by 1 February at the moment is Number One on the list of Top Free iPad Apps in Apps Store Indonesia. Inside you will find magazine samples published by Indonesia’s major publishing companies such as Hai, Nova, Otomotif, and Info Komputer.

Unlike Scoop from Apps Foundry displaying magazine as it is, Majalah app develop its own content for its digital content. For example Hai magazines GD23 edition, there were only 5 topics there and insert of magazine cover photo shooting video.

To this date there’s no magazine download or selling scheme (full version) in this application. There’s no confirmation whether such option will be available in the near future.

Scoop chose a rather different path. From various kinds of magazine offered, usually Scoop will offer the first edition for free. Afterwards they will charge some amount for each download. The fee itself isn’t really expensive, $0.99 to $1.99, even cheaper compared to the magazine’s price itself considering the reduced production component cost.

If we look at it, magazine application such as Zinio has been successful in selling various kinds of digital magazines. The offer is quite tempting. Sometimes there are several dozen editions and are bundled with much cheaper prices than usual.

For me, actually reading magazine on digital media such as iPad is much more comfortable for some reason:

• You don’t have to carry anything else other than tablet media. No need carrying one, two, three magazines anymore because all are digitalized in one media.

• A simple way of keeping the magazines and you don’t need to wory of keeping too much magazines. This often becomes problem because old magazines you don’t bother to read anymore can eat up your space. In digital media, if you don’t need them anymore, just hit that DELETE button.

• Environmental friendly by reducing paper usage and saves lots of trees from logging risk.

It is not easy to switch to digital media, especially that feeling you get when you are holding and reading conventional printed media, but if there’s a will there’s a way, this problem sooner or later will be solved. Would rather read your magazine in printed version or will you dare yourself to switch to digital media?

Translated by: Nita Sellya.