Extra! Extra! Read (mostly) all about it.

When not teasing other people who write about skateboarding, I’m poaching their work. Concrete Wave has made their current issue available for viewing online at a site called Banquet Action Sports Video Community. Even though it says it is the full issue of Volume 5 number 5, it’s actually missing about seven or eight spreads in the back of the magazine that contain an artist spotlight and a lot of the smaller ads. Personally, the back is one of my favorite parts of the mag. I like checking out the small companies to see what interesting or weird new products have come out. The interface is OK, you can click on a page to make it larger, and most of the larger ads act as web links to the companies in question. One annoying thing is that linked ads have a pulsing glow that distracts from the reading experience of the page next to it and prevent a clear view of the ad itself. A better way to implement that would have been to activate the glow on rollover only. Come to think of it, a better way to implement it would have been to make the whole thing a downloadable PDF. The web links could work and you wouldn’t have to wrestle with a proprietary interface. In any case, it’s still useful for being able to read most of the current issue of Concrete Wave if you are too cheap to buy it or just want to check it out. I believe they make each issue available this way, but they don’t seem to keep an archive. Check it out.

[Source: About.com]