If you are like me, you have storage boxes full of old magazines, your storage is filling up, new magazines are delivered every month... you're wondering where to put them since you can't quite bring yourself to throwing them away.

Digital magazines have been around for quite a while, in various formats. I even subscribed to a magazine in the 80's that was delivered on a floppy disk. But until recently they haven't been quite there or the reading devices have not been quite up to snuff.

The recent flood of tablet devices has somewhat changed that. Even I got myself an iPad2 when I found one on sale. Mostly I use it to browse YouTube, I find it largely useless otherwise but I just don't want to spend any of my free time in front of a computer.

Some of the magazines I subscribe offer digital versions, but so far I've been reluctant to take the plunge. I'm old-fashioned, I like physical things. I still have all my White Dwarfs from the 80's. I have bought digital things as well, but for the most part I've no idea where the ones I got 10 years ago are. Maybe they were lost in a hard disk crash, maybe I've just misplaced them, who knows...

Enter Ravage magazine. This is the new magazine (at least in English) put out by Cool Mini or Not. It has received rave reviews and I have been interested in it for quite some. It has just proven to be very difficult to get hold of, as it quickly sells out at the local store and CMoN didn't do subscriptions (apparently they do now).

So I grabbed the digital edition of Ravage and gave it a spin. While I was at it, I also grabbed a preview version of Wargames Illustrated.

One thing you will quickly realize is that even the larger iPad screen is still significantly smaller than most magazines. If the magazine does not specifically design their layout for tablets, you will be looking at a smaller than life version of the real thing. This is where being cheap bites you. My iPad2's resolution is okay for things that were designed for a 10" screen. But when you try to read a reduced size image of a magazine that already has relatively small print in real life, it falls just a bit short. I presume the newer Retina displays are better, but they cost almost twice as much... I won't be upgrading anytime soon.

So, being text-heavy Wargames Illustrated does not suit smaller/low-grade tablets very well. The 360 spins and extra images do not change this basic fact. And quite frankly, why don't the extra images zoom to full screen? That would be a much better use of the digital format.

Ravage magazine suffers much less from this, largely because it has much much less text than an average issue of Wargames Illustrated. Ravage has other issues, but I want to give it another chance before I judge. Let's get back to Ravage next month.

On the whole going digital may very well be a way forward, but it really requires that the magazines start to design for the devices. Just scanning your paper version is not enough. Adding bells and whistles does not help, the problem is with the basic readibility and the layout.

And it would be nice if they could come up with a screen that is actually visible in bright sunlight. I like a nice cup of tea in the garden with good reading, and so far my black&white Kindle is the only electronic device that has been up to the task.

P.S. Current score 100-47. I need to get more stuff painted.

P.P.S. Oh yes, the pictures have nothing to do with the subject at hand.

maxxon