I feel like I’ve harped on this before, but I think David succinctly describes what print companies are doing wrong with their digital magazines.
I think it’s a stretch to say “printed magazines work better in every way.” Print doesn’t work better for breaking news, interactive visualizations, collaborative real-time problem solving, blogging whimsical ideas that aren’t print-worthy (a la The New Yorker), community, e-commerce, location-aware behavior or searching archives.
Boom. Tablets have the potential to bring the best of the web and print together, but no one is going to buy a more expensive, harder-to-read version of a print magazine. But if you bring social and interactive elements, then it becomes something really interesting.