The future of magazines?

Quite some time ago, I can't remember exactly when and I'm too lazy to research it, this awesome PHP magazine went from a print+PDF version to PDF-only. I was bummed. I can easily read long texts from paper (and the printed magazine looked *awesome*), but I have a hard time reading articles from my laptop screen. My eyes quickly get tired. So with the magazine turning PDF-only, an end came to my following the magazine actively. I thought the magazine's management has lost all touch with reality, with what developers wanted. Had they?

Fastforward to today. I still can not read long texts from screen without getting tired eyes. OK, let me rephrase that: I still can not read long texts from my laptop screen without getting tired eyes. At some point at the end of last year, during the holidays, our family got a gift from this friendly guy with the long white beard. No, not Santa Claus, but the Dutch version, Sinterklaas. The gift? You can guess it: an iPad.

So with the iPad there and having seen tweets of people reading the magazine on the device, I decided to try that for a while. Now, having read some of the backlog of the magazine and also some of the newer editions, I can only say: This is the future of magazines. This is the way we'll read them in the future. iPads (and similar devices) make for much easier reading.

My setup right now is simple: I download the PDFs of the magazine on my laptop. I put them in a specific iPad folder within my Dropbox. I have created a seperate Dropbox account for the iPad, with which I have shared this iPad folder. I put all my PDFs in this folder, which then allows me to open them on my iPad.

So. Had the magazine's management lost all touch with reality? Or were they really looking into the future, and were they simply thinking of ingenius plans to rule the world. I can do nothing but conclude that it is the latter. They saw an opportunity and jumped on it, as one of the first I've ever seen make such a move. I am actually quite happy they did so, even while they did alienate a big part of their readerbase. I am quite sure they'll get back most of those, one at a time, as soon as they buy their own iPad or similar device. They've just been an early adopter, and you need those in this world.