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The possible arrival of Apple’s long-rumored iTablet has old media companies scrambling. They all seem to believe that because the tablet is similar in shape to a magazine that it is going to save the magazine business.

A few weeks ago Conde Nast’s Wired magazine presented their vision of what this digital magazine could look like. The video clip (viewable here) shows standard magazine layouts that spring to life with moving pictures, text that zings up from unreadable to readable at the swipe of a finger, slideshows that play fullscreen before magically transforming into video, and pages that turn with a tap. A week later Time Inc. did a very similar thing with a digital version of Sports Illustrated created in collaboration with The Wonder Factory NY. Even Bonnier is getting in on the action. Yesterday, they released a video of “Mag+” a collaboration they’ve been working on with the design firm BERG, according to a story on the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy.

All this talk of digital magazines has even given rise to a new joint venture between old media giants Time Inc., Conde Nast, The Hearst Corporation, Meredith and the News Corporation in which they’re are planning a “digital newsstand” to sell “digital versions” of their publications, according to a story in the New York Times.

The consortium envisions selling these versions of their publications through an online store akin to iTunes. The hope, said Mr. Squires, who has been executive vice president of Time Inc., is to grab not just readers but also advertisers, allowing publishers to charge higher rates for digital ads, which now are much cheaper than print ads.

Sadly, in all of these plans and announcements old media continue to make the same basic mistake. They all use the magazine as metaphor for digital content distribution. We all understand why they do it—they’ve been bringing in billions of dollars with the magazine model for more than 100 years. Unfortunately for them, it is precisely this magazine myopia that is causing old media to miss the major problem currently facing “the magazine” industry.
The problem is this: magazines and magazine advertising sales are not flagging simply because people no longer want to pick up a stapled or glued together collection of print pages from a newsstand—thought that is a part of it. The most significant reason that I believe sales are falling is that people no longer consume media in a manner consistent with the static, exclusive, walled-off collections of words and photos that the magazine format requires. The social web has changed all this. People now aggregate content themselves (with help from friends and trusted sources) through Twitter, Facebook, and RSS feeds. The customer now decides in real time who is going to filter information for them.

Even from a usability standpoint the magazine format fails. Print layouts were created because publishers needed to present a grouping of words and photographs in a restricted physical space so they could be printed, bound, physically delivered, and easily consumed. When content goes online those restrictions are gone. It’s just as easy to view 10 stories from 10 difference sources as it is from one source. To put it more simply, the magazine format is dead.

If the major media companies were pouring as much time and energy into exploring the social web, and all the new ways people are interacting with content as they have trying to figure out how to force the magazine format into the digital space they would likely be able to move forward without going out of business first.

One thing is certain: when those new, shiny Apple iTablets are announced next month they will be able to interact with the entire social web in real-time, everywhere. And that more than anything should make those in the media business wide-eyed with optimism for completely new ways of monetizing content.