Electronic Magazines Although Omni Will Be On America Online, The Print Version Will Be No More

I should’ve seen it coming. The warning signs were certainly clear enough: soaring paper prices, creeping postal-rate increases, rising distribution costs. It was only a matter of time before someone in the magazine industry decided to pull the plug on print altogether.

Omni - that aggressively forward-looking journal of pop science and science-fiction - has announced that it’s through with paper-and-ink publishing. Starting with the May issue, the print version will be scrapped, and the 17-year-old title will exist only on America Online. A free-standing Internet edition is planned for the fall. The magazine’s only news-rack presence will be quarterly special issues. “The use of on-line services by our readership has become nearly ubiquitous,” explained Keith Ferrell, editorial director for on-line services.

Is this a foolhardy, desperate move or an impressive display of early-adapter guts? Let’s wait and see. Right now, there are dozens of magazines - or, rather, select parts of magazines - on the Big Three commercial services. And the Net proper is still uncharted territory - a cheesy wasteland of beta-tests, come-ons, construction areas, gimmicks and gizmos. Mass-market consumer titles have yet to deliver the goods. The largest obstacle comes down to money, of course: how best to sell the new medium to a critical mass of subscribers and advertisers.

A quick tour through three of the Web’s largest and most-developed magazine hubs shows a rather dismal state of development thus far:

The Electronic Newsstand - at http:/ /www.enews.com/ - carries a select few sample articles from 270 magazines and newsletters, from the popular to the obscure. The material is arranged in a large and very unappetizing gopher-menu (i.e., it looks like it was typed on a 55-year-old manual typewriter with a bum ribbon). There are no graphics. Often, a magazine will post just a single article, a table of contents and ordering information. And what little content there is can be infuriatingly out of date. (Among the scant “current issue” offerings, the New Yorker was 3 weeks old and the Village Voice 6 weeks old.)

The Hearst Corp.’s Multimedia Newsstand - at http://mmnewsstand.com/ - is also primarily in the business of hawking paper-and-ink magazines electronically. The site features 325 magazines for sale - with no content. There are a few slick graphics of current magazine covers, some gimmicks such as a trivia contest and T-shirt giveaways, but no good reads. Imagine a digitalized version of the Publisher’s Clearinghouse envelope - sans Dick Clark, Ed McMahon and the prize money - and you’re clear on the concept.

Time/Warner’s Pathfinder - at http:/ /www.timeinc.com/pathfinder/Welcome.html - is far and away the best of bigs at the moment. There you’ll find most of the current feature content of Money, People, Vibe, Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated, plus the full text of Time. The finest design and execution can be found in the Virtual Garden, a subsection produced by the digital wing of Time/Life, which features gardening content from Sunset, Southern Living and Homeground. (The latter is a horticulture-cum-literary title.) Don’t surf this site without checking out the Sunset area. Although the Sunset search-engine can search only through recent issues right now, I eagerly anticipate a time when it will be able to search by topic through the entirety of Sunset’s back issues. Homeowners such as myself who own Sunset libraries going back to the Eisenhower administration must buy year-to-year paper indexes and search box-to-box for that one special recipe or home-repair article.

Besides Time and Sunset, the two mass-market magazines that seem to be really burning up the wires are Playboy (http:/ /www.playboy.com) and Penthouse (http:/ /www.penthousemag.com). This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Net culture and the huge demand for erotica therein. The sites - both free for now - offer limited content and a few cheap thrills. But compared to the wild and woolly material floating around other parts of the Net, the offerings are weak tea, indeed.

Although the site looks impressive, it should be noted that Playboy didn’t suddenly get a hipness transplant coincidental to its move on-line. In a straight-up clueless move, Playboy is using the site to solicit entries in a “Girls of the Internet” photo spread. (Click here for hearty laughter.) I’d love to be in Playboy’s editorial office when they review the electronic entries and realize that 40 percent of the photos are of the same girl and have been floating around the Usenet system for the past five years.