Although you won’t find fine corinthian leather or green felt, magazine apps on the iPad are still some of the worst offenders when it comes to skeuomorphism getting in the way of usability. As Bryan Larrick points out:

Eschewing live text and making the text an image file preserves appearance, albeit at the expense of file size, search engine optimization, usability, and much of the ability to update content dynamically.

Enter magazines. Most magazines made the decision that preserving appearance is more important than utilizing all of the iPad’s functionality, so instead of pages loading text dynamically, a typical magazine page is one big png file.

Design Dictatorship