Updated December 16, 2013: From a recent gigaom.com posting:

Publishers must break free of the Newsstand and InDesign/PDF trap…

<snip>

The Newsstand and tablet magazine honeymoon is over.

More here on the demise of tablet magazines.

*

Slate.com recently redesigned their site. Call me a Luddite, but the new design is a complete fail. Pages won’t load. There’s no search bar. Comment log-in/sign-up won’t load. Timeouts loading pages in a browser are interminable. The entire site update has been designed to be “looked at” and to “look pretty” on a tablet or smartphone. Ho-hum.

If you really want a summary of how some of slate.com’s formerly dedicated viewers feel about the site redesign, check out the comments – if you have time to wait for them to show up.

Here’s a timely article on why tablet/smartphone magazines are a fail on gigaom.com. Slate didn’t really turn itself into a smartphone/tablet mag, did they? Perhaps that’s why there’s no search bar.

I’ve already jumped ship to http://www.theatlantic.com/.