Why Do Magazines Look So Terrible on the New iPad?

The complaints were first brought to light by Tumblr blogger Jamie Billett. He pointed out that in The New Yorker’s iPad app, the text on some pages is rendered as HTML, and the text on other pages is rendered as an image file. The latter pages now appear “badly aliased”— i.e. conspicuously pixelated—throughout the app because the images haven’t been formatted to accommodate the new iPad’s 2,048x1,536-pixel resolution, he complains.

Titles from other magazine publishers—we looked at Time magazine and Sports Illustrated from Time Inc., and at Esquire and O: The Oprah Magazine from Hearst—all suffered from the same problems.