On Nov 1, RollingStone launched it’s first full digital edition. This is pretty cool because they have never put ALL of their articles, reviews, etc. from a single edition online. It is a very interesting combination of words and the ability to hear the songs immediately through Rhapsody Online. If you go to the Charts page (pg. 212), you can listen to most all of the tracks and albums that are on this page. Click here to go to the digital version of 40 years of RollingStone.com

Overall, I like the integration of content and music. However I have some issues with the viewer they are using and how difficult it is to read. Literally, they have re-created all the pages of the magazine in a viewer format. Same pages, same size, same delivery. While kind of cool, it doesn’t work as well as using dynamic web pages and formating the content for the web. There is not an easy way to skip large chunks of pages, the resolution is not great when the entire page is in the viewer and even when expanded to be readeable - it’s not very condusive to browsing and linking. I think they need to ditch this viewer format and figure out a way to integrate the content into the web browser with the same links to play the music. They’ve already started down that path, now the need to finish it.