Reading Shooting Magazines - on-line

[BigDuncs]

This is one of these questions that I may well feel a bit silly when I get the answer but here goes......
The prompt for the question is the circular email saying that "Target Shooter March issue out NOW..."

My computer screen is 21" and with a resolution of 1680 x 1050 I can see plenty of stuff on the screen. But the format of my screen is (of course) landscape and the magazine is in portrait format. So how do I view magazines like Target Shooter in a way that I can read the page without having to scroll up and down within the page - and many pages have 2 columns, compounding the need to scroll? Fine for printed material but not to read on-line.

Is there a better way to read on-line mags? Or why do publishers format on-line copy in portrait when it will mostly be read in landscape format?

[Hemmers]

For magazines that are both printed and distributed online it makes sense to just throw the files for the printed (portrait) version online rather than do all new layouts in landscape with the incumbent effort and expense.

If you have a screen with sufficient resolution, it's easily possible to just scale the magazine and you read it in half the width of the screen instead of using the full width, whilst getting whole length visible. I guess you could also just rotate the screen (some will without too much hassle) to portrait.

For online-only publications one does wonder why people haven't started innovating with landscape formats. Probably because the software packages are set up for printed publications (i.e. portrait) and its easier to simply go over from the legacy formats for interoperability. If there comes a time when printed is pretty much dead and people use exclusively electronic means to read magazines or books, then landscape formats might come along. Of course with the rise of e-readers and tablets, it's no hassle to go from landscape to portrait (standing a laptop on end is less ideal), so the portrait formats may well live on.