But long articles are more difficult. People will only read about one screen at a time. Search software is a major benefit which on-line publishing has brought to magazines. Future hopes to mount back issues of all its on-line titles eventually. It will be very useful for the magazine staff as well as the readers, because we won t have to go flicking through all the magazines on the office shelves to find that passing reference to Jos Carreras role as Manrico in whatever opera it was.
Graphics are still an area in which print wins out, however.
You can have nice big high quality pictures in a magazine where you really go for impact - the pure impact of spread. That might be the only text on the spread. Yet solutions are arriving all the time. Ainsley looks forward to exploiting the interactivity built in to Netscape 2 and Java applets. This should permit customised views of a magazine.