Some people (Richard Kaufman, cough-cough) like to talk about the digital versions of Magic Magazine and Genii as if they were essentially the same thing, but they’re not. Like the iPad version of the Wall Street Journal, the digital Magic Magazine is a true app, with an appealing, customized interface for reading articles, viewing photographs, and watching embedded videos. It has to be an expensive process to convert the magazine into this format. The digital version of Genii, on the other hand, is a glorified PDF file with some videos attached. Reading the two digital versions is a completely different user experience.

I’m not trying to knock Genii (I actually subscribe to Genii, and not Magic Magazine), but I get tired of hearing Richard tell us, ad nauseum, what a great “value” his back issues are compared to Magic Magazine. It is a good value, but only so long as you are paying that subscription to Genii every single year. And if I choose to stop my subscription to Genii, I can’t just purchase individual digital issues like I can with Magic Magazine. (I normally purchase only 3 or 4 digital issues of Magic Magazine each year, based on whether the contents of a particular issue are really interesting to me.) It's simply two different business models, and it’s hard to say that one is a better “value” than the other.