jmtd → log → interzone → Interzone digital
(no, this isn't a blog post about Joy Division songs)
Last time I wrote about Interzone, I was discussing issue #294, the<br>first published under new management in a paperback-sized format<br>("JB6"). The format and presentation of the magazine was fantastic: it fit in a<br>lot of my pockets, and was packed with 15 stories as well as the regular<br>columns, in full colour with fantastic layouts and illustrations. Sadly there<br>was only one more physical issue before Interzone was forced to become a<br>digital-only publication.
IZ issues 294 and 295
I don't want to dwell on the sad necessity to move to digital. Interzone<br>continues on, celebrating the milestone issue #300 in 2024. Subscriptions<br>are managed via Patreon.<br>Issue #305 just came out.
Instead I wanted to write a small bit about how I engaged with the paper<br>magazine, and the difficulties I've had trying to engage with not just<br>Interzone but any magazine-style publication in a digital context.
With most fiction, I read linearly: start the beginning and read to the end, in<br>order. That works well for me with e-readers. But for magazines (and<br>most non-fiction) I don't, I jump around: usually starting with the<br>table of contents, I might pick a short column to start, or jump into the<br>middle of the "book reviews" section to read about a specific book. I might<br>skip sections entirely. I find it very difficult to read like this with an<br>e-reader. I think this is partly because I reference the depth of the<br>paper book or magazine, its thickness, to orient myself. But it's also partly<br>the limitations of e-ink.
My tick-list for an issue of IZ
For print-Interzone, I used to start by inserting a small piece of paper<br>inside the cover (the delivery slip was ideal). On this I listed the stories<br>within and ticked them off when I read them (sometimes I double-ticked if I<br>really liked a story). That helped me to remember, perhaps months or years<br>later, whether I'd read all the stories or not, and which I liked.<br>I could do something similar on some e-readers: the Remarkable for<br>instance. But it's far from convenient to do on most e-ink devices.
Interzone digital is available as both ePUB, the most common format for e-books, and PDF. For reading on my<br>regular Kobo e-reader, PDFs don't work very well at all. I think this is<br>generally true of most e-readers.
Interzone was (and is) a well-designed magazine. The value of it was not<br>just the content of the text, but the context: how the stories were<br>presented; the accompanying art (most often colour in recent decades),<br>but also the typesetting. ePUB<br>doesn't specify much of that stuff<br>exactly: it leaves that up to the client and the client's preferences.<br>And there's a lot of advantages to that:<br>Prefer a different font face or size? No problem. And<br>most importantly for accessibility:<br>If reading in ePUB makes Interzone available to more readers then that's<br>a great thing. But sadly a lot is lost, IMHO.
IZ #305 on iPad Mini
The solution I'm trying is to read the PDF version on the iPad Mini I<br>resurrected earlier in the year.<br>Despite being an Internet tablet, since it's not really usable for browsing the<br>web anymore it's strangely still a distraction-free device. In fact it's pretty<br>much single-purpose for reading Interzone and the odd other book which benefits<br>from being read as PDF. I can appreciate the stylistic choices made in the<br>page-setting as they were intended; I can quickly jump around the issue without<br>waiting for an e-ink refresh; I get full colour; and whilst it would be tiring<br>to read for a long time on the iPad screen, for the length of articles or<br>stories in a magazine, this isn't a problem.
It's not a solution for tracking what I've read (that version of ipadOS is too<br>old to support clumsily scrawling on PDF pages with your fingers, at least in<br>the Books app) but it otherwise seems to work well, so I'll see how it goes.
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