Indie Pub Death + Taxes Tries Interactivity

Esquire might be testing out augmented reality, but it’s not the only magazine trying to get its readers to interact with the magazine online and off.

Indie music pub Death + Taxes has paired with Mobot — a visual image search company — to create an interactive version of its November/December issue, on newsstands next week. Mobot’s technology can be activated by readers to create an interactive experience with 10 stories in the issue.

This is how it works: take a photo with the camera on your phone of a page from one of the interactive stories and text or email the image to D+T. In response, you’ll get access to additional content available for download. For example, take a photo of guitarist Marnie Stern and you’ll unlock this video of her playing.

Mobot has used its technology for advertisements before, but this time the project is completely edit-driven. And the whole project is funded by Scion, with no additional cost going to the readers. The technology may only reach D+T‘s small audience (it has circulation of 54,000 with 135,000 total readers), but it may not be long until we see some bigger titles testing out this interactive option or something similar.

Related: Esquire Continues To Bring Multimedia to Print Issues

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