So, everyone is chatting about Nicholas Baker’s 6300-word takedown of the Kindle in the New Yorker. While the piece makes some valid and clever critiques (on the screen: “This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon?”), you can’t help but feel that, after having written a glowing, unexpected paean to Wikipedia, Baker is just becoming good at upending expectations. As everyone worries about Wikipedia or praises the Kindle, Baker swoops in and says “not so fast!”.

The timing was interesting, though. The Apple Tablet rumour mill is churning at that breathless, slightly insane pace than only Apple can conjure. With murmurs of an electronic bookstore to accompany its launch, people were ready to say the Kindle was just an intermediary step, a blip until the the true masters of digital media revolutions stepped into the fray. Already, before the existence of the device has even been confirmed, it’s a Kindle-killer.

I don’t know whether I want to read books on a tablet with an LCD screen – and I genuinely mean that I don’t know. I assumed I would never read 6300-word New Yorker articles on my phone but, to my surprise, it works for me, and it works well. But an entire book on a backlit screen? One that, quite literally, does hundreds of things, from being a remote control to a game board to a movie screen? I’m always open to technological change, but I have enough trouble concentrating as it is. This seems suspect to me.

But entirely by chance, yesterday I remembered to check Wag’s Revue, on online literary magazine that has a lovely aesthetic, one that melds a bit of paper and web culture. After browsing the table of contents, I was really keen to read Lili Wright’s essay “The Country I Came From“. But as I sat down to, I realised I didn’t want to read this on my desktop monitor; it didn’t feel right. This was the sort of thing I wanted to read while lying back on a couch or sitting on a patio. I’m not even sure if the site would work on an iPhone, but if it did, the type would certainly be too small to read. Here, it seemed, was a new form in need of a new delivery mechanism.

Of course, in light of the Apple rumours, it was impossible not to think: what would this online magazine be like as an experience on a 9 or 11″ tablet? Well, you’d get:

• a fixed screen-size so that magazine articles were not only easy to read, but page layouts could be standardized. Wag’s could maintain its design but be far more user-friendly.
• unlike current e-ink technology, you would get full colour, and crisp, vivid graphics. The design of a magazine would be emphasised again, but in a new way, one that would also include usability as a key part of its ethos.
• easy page turning: like an iPhone, you’d just swipe your finger.
• and perhaps just as importantly, an online magazine store – possibly even paid magazine aggregators which would collect articles from various sources and put them together into your own personal magazine. RSS Readers are, after all, very ugly.

To me anyway, that sounds great. If the magazine has always been that intermediary between newsprint and the book, between what was once the ‘immediacy’ of the daily and the deliberate slowness of a novel, then perhaps it is most ideal to make the transition to the mobile web.

And I think the magazine has been overlooked in the past few years. While we know they’re disappearing, they certainly haven’t made as large a splash as the decline of the newspaper. But as the newspaper and its physicality starts to seem anachronistic, the cultural analysis central to the magazine doesn’t feel quite as obsolete. Don’t we all still turn to big, long New Yorker articles to reframe the debates we are constantly having in micro on our blogs? In the unending rush of both opinion and information, the magazine still has a cultural function to perform.

So bring on the tablet, and forget ebooks for the time being. Let’s think about the e-magazine.