Once upon a time there was an absolute smorgasbord of UFO zines, both amateur efforts and more professional releases. The market just doesn’t seem to be there anymore however – no doubt influenced by the immediacy of the internet. So it’s good to see any efforts to combine new technology and UFO writing, such as the newly-released UFO World magazine:
UFO WORLD is the world’s only interactive UFO magazine featuring worldwide news, articles, video footage of sightings, audio files of interviews and world leading researchers, and live links to emails and websites. Every video and audio file is fully embedded into the magazine eliminating the need to download separate attached files…
You the reader have full control over your downloaded magazine. Whether you choose to burn it to disc, copy it to your MP3 player or print the magazine and circulate it to your friends and colleagues.
The first issue is available for free, with subsequent issues costing just £1 each. Sounds like a great setup in theory, although I think this project might run into problems with both the file size (close to 250MB due to the embedded video and audio), and the distribution method (having to download an application in order to access the magazine).
We did similar things with Sub Rosa magazine, although for the interactive content we hyperlinked to the material on the web so that people could pick and choose which things they wanted to access. Of course, that makes viewing the interactive content dependent on having a web connection when reading it, so there are problems both ways.
In any case, good luck to the team behind UFO World.
Update: Anyone not inclined to install the download application, you can download the PDF file directly from SendSpace (thanks to Joe McGonagle).
