SpinKnit (eMag)

Reviewed by Syne Mitchell on February 7, 2011

Interweave Press recently started a new venture: SpinKnit, their latest e-mag. I think an electronic magazine is a brilliant idea and I found both the content and the technology behind this venture fascinating.

Because something this innovative has two components: the content and the technology that delivers it, I’m addressing them separately.

Content

The first thing I noticed when I opened the application was that it’s a beautiful publication. As with most of Interweave’s projects, there’s a strong aesthetic sense and gorgeous photos.

I love that the video is embedded right into the magazine in context. So much of hand-work is in the motion, and video is the best of the electronic mediums to show that off. (In-person is better still, but as much as I wish Kathryn Alexander would come visit me at my home and talk about her energized yarns, that’s unlikely.)

The magazine starts off with a video chat with the editors of SpinKnit: Linda Ligon and Anita Osterhaug. It’s homey and charming, 2:33 minutes of their discussion about the goal of the new eMag and their plans for the future.

The majority of the content in the inaugural issue centers around five topics:

Spinning and knitting in Chincero, Peru
Kathryn Alexander and her work with energized yarns
Paco-Vicunas in the Colorado Rockies
An interview with Priscilla Gibson-Roberts
As a finisher, a 5-minute video of Judith MacKenzie talking about bottom-whorl spindles.

A top-notch line up of contributors and content.

As wonderful as the video was, the written content felt a bit light. There were 23 articles, but each one was only a page or two, and these were pages with a lot of pictures. It took me a while to figure out where the patterns for the projects were. There’s a little “PDF” button that you click to download (extract?) the PDF as a separate file.

I think I’d describe SpinKnit more as a video-magazine than an electronic-magazine as most of the content seemed to be in the video sections, with the print and photos acting as a frame for that content.

Technology

SpinKnit isn’t a video-enabled PDF, it’s an application that you install on your machine. It runs on top of the Adobe Air platform. I don’t know (not having the inside scoop) why Interweave made this choice, but I’d guess that it has to do with digital rights management. The downside of this is that you can’t just put the file in DropBox or EverNote and have it available on both your desktop and laptop. You’d have to install it separately on each machine, and I’m not sure what Interweave’s policy is on that. Being a custom application also blocks you from reading it on an iPad or e-reader.

SpinKnit was a whopping big download: 477 MB. Will the next edition be as big? I’m not sure. As an end-user, I’d hope that the first install set up the infrastructure and that future downloads (being content-only) would be smaller. Of course, perhaps the size came from the video content, not the infrastructure?

There is one thing about it being an application instead of a PDF, that swirly knit-fabric icon is darned cute.

There were some features that I expected but didn’t find: like a search box. If this is the first of a series (just hoping here) then it’d be great to be able to search across issues. Also, I wanted a way to index into the content and set my own bookmarks. Cut-and-paste was disabled in SpinKnit, I’m guessing to protect the content.

There’s a Media Sort feature in SpinKnit which is nice, it brings all the videos and slideshows together in an index. I would have wished that the PDF patterns were indexed there as well, for easy access.

Another thing that would be nice to add is close-captions or transcripts for the video, to make the content more accessible to a wider audience.

Summary

Overall, SpinKnit represents a huge effort and a large leap forward technologically. It’s exciting to see something like this come to market. I’m terribly curious to see how future eMag publications will tie in with the first (for example, will you be able to search across the entire collection?)

Congrats Interweave, may this be the first of many electronic publishing successes!

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Submitted by Anonymous on 12 January, 2012 - 02:08

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There were both features that

Submitted by Anonymous on 9 January, 2012 - 05:47

There were both features that I unsurprising but didn't grow 650-378 equal a see box. If this is the first of a playoff 70-291 then it'd be major to be able to examine crosswise issues.

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Submitted by Anonymous on 13 February, 2011 - 20:07

I read your review on my iPad. If I can't read Spin Knit here I probably won't bother.

ePubs -- could have a wider audience

Submitted by Anonymous on 7 February, 2011 - 15:43

What a great innovation! But the choice to publish in a way that doesn't allow reading on an iPad or other tablet is a big mistake. The target for innovative media are those who use it already. I would buy these Interweave pubs (the sock one too) in a minute if they were more accessible to me. It's a start I guess. ... Merna

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