1) The Kiteboarder Magazine
http://www.theringmedia.com/KBMAG/Archive/Archive.phpFormat : Downloadable PDF
The standard for kiteboarding magazines (online and print). Great layout, great content, and a great bunch of guys who runs the magazine.
This magazine is as easy to read online as it is to read offline, and the online version is identical to the offline version. What more could you want?
The archives date back all the way to September 2004, and currently there are 16 magazines to download.
My personal favorite; I never miss an issue. In fact, I am tempted to subscribe to the print version of this magazine, it’s that good.
Ryan Ricatelli, the editor of this magazine, also runs a great website with weekly podcasts. Check the website out at
http://www.asnews.net/ and download The Kiteboarder Magazine at
http://www.theringmedia.com/KBMAG/Archive/Archive.php
2) FreeMagazin
http://www.free-magazin.de/freemagazin/downloads/Format : Downloadable PDF
Although this is a German magazine, I have been subscribing to the print version of this magazine for nearly 2 years. Like the print version, the online version is a high quality magazine with amazing pictures. The magazine covers kiteboarding, surfing, and windsurfing. If there’s one magazine that will make you want to learn German, this is it.
Like Kiteboarder Magazine, the layout is professionally done, and the online magazine is identical to the print magazine.
A must “read”, highly commended. I never miss an issue of this magazine either.
3) IKsurf Magazine
http://www.iksurfmag.com/Format : Online Flash Viewer
Another magazine with great content – featuring lengthy articles and great pictures.
This magazine suffers one fundamental flaw: The flash interface for this magazine seems to be particularly slow. I often wait more than 2 minutes for the next page to load, only to find out I was waiting for a double page ad to load. I usually only last a few pages before I click out. It’s a pity as this magazine has a wealth of great content, only to be hindered by the pitfalls of online flash readers.
If you can get past the slow loading pages, and ads, this magazine has good content and pictures. Worth checking out.
4) Core Online Magazine
http://www.coreonlinemagazine.com/Format : Online Flash Viewer
Another online magazine. Featuring great content and pictures, but once again no downloadable PDF.
All this being said, I quite enjoyed the articles in this magazine, and it’s well put together.
5) Kite Now Magazine
http://www.kitenow.com.br/home/Format : Online Flash Viewer
A new online magazine from Brazil. In Portuguese, but features great pictures and fairly fast to view. The interface is pretty easy to use, but it suffers the same problems as the rest of the online magazines : You are forced to view the entire magazine online.
6) Kiteboarding Journal
http://www.kiteboardingjournal.com/Format : PDF
This is another new magazine. It’s not as well put together as the rest, but the content is still pretty good.
The PDF file links to other PDF’s which means you have to download a bunch of PDF’s instead of downloading just 1 PDF which you can read offline.Even though it’s a PDF, it’s really and index file which points to a bunch of smaller PDF’s – which sort of defeats the whole purpose of PDF which is to make it easy to read.
7) Epic Kite Magazine
http://www.epickitemag.com/ Format : Online Flash Reader
Another online magazine subscribing to the flash reader format. This one has a slight difference : the entire magazine loads upfront, making browsing nearly instant once you start reading.
That being said, this online interface actually works better than the others :although the content to ad ratio was acceptable, the few ads that loaded didn’t hinder me as the entire magazine loaded upfront. I could skip pages in an instant and get to where I wanted to in a reasonable amount of time.
The layout wasn’t as good as that of the other magazines.
Closing comments: There’s a wealth of kiteboarding magazines out there to be read for free, and the amount of online kiteboarding magazines seems to be on the increase. This is a good thing for readers in one way, but in another it seems to present a new problem.
Online Flash ReadersI’ve got a major beef with online flash readers in general, and the format in which most of these online magazines are presented.
Why, you might ask. The answer is simple : The online magazines that subscribe to the flash reader format display a wealth of information through a difficult to use interface. This makes accessing all this information difficult, time consuming and frustrating. Navigating the pages are difficult, and it makes searching for what you want impossible. It forces a linear way of reading (traditional print) on a web platform, and that doesn’t work.
People read magazines and newspapers in a different way to websites. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.
Some of these online magazines just fail miserably when it comes to readability and usability.
The average user spends a maximum of 3 minutes online before they venture off to another site. These magazines require you to either wait a few minutes for the pages to load upfront, or require you to wait a few seconds for each page to load, only to find out that you’ve been waiting for a double page ad to load, and the only way to get to the articles you want to read is through this interface. It’s frustrating.
To approach the online medium with a format that was designed for traditional print publishing doesn’t work using the online Flash format that we see used here.
Which brings me to the PDF format. This format works. Why?
PDFs can be navigated by keyword search, table of contents or hyperlinks. This makes the document easy to read and do what you want. You’re not crippled by a Flash design that doesn’t allow you to search, makes you wait for pages, or forces you to view pages you don’t want.
Once downloaded, PDFs are very fast to read. If you want to skip a page or an ad, simply go to the next page, just like you would in a magazine. No waiting, no frustration, no problems.
PDF documents are searchable. You can search for any text in the document and it’ll take you there in an instant.
They’re easy to print. Since most of the articles in the PDF magazines are as detailed or identical to their magazine versions, you might want to print an article and read it. PDFs are easy to print and they fit great on a page.
All these advantages translate into faster, cheaper and less complex viewing, which makes the PDF format a winner when it comes to online magazines.
In closing, I’d like to praise both
The Kiteboarder Magazine and
FreeMagazin for having great online (and print) magazines. These magazines are always packed with detailed and high quality editorials coupled with great pictures. The layout looks great and it’s easy to read.