The era of the printed magazine is is coming to end. It may be taking longer than either Christine and I would prefer, but the national postal strike in the UK this week has helped drive another nail into the coffin of an outdated industry.

You may recall back in August we argued that it was high time the the paper version of the weekly Autosport magazine offered a digital counterpart for subscribers. This would not only enable text searching, but also allow international readers to access the content in a timely manner.

Thankfully, the impending threat of said postal strike has pushed Autosport owners Haymarket into making the leap into the digital domain, and this morning Dank broke the news that Autosport is available digitally!

How good does that look?

There's an official forum thread and a dedicated page containing more details. Anyone who already has Plus access to the website, which includes all magazine subscribers, gets free access to the digital copy of special edition print. Sadly it's a "special" because a certain British driver won the Formula One driver's championship at the weekend, but I'd like to think the lesser-seen green header additionally symbolises the momentous move from ink to the internet.

Ceros are the company selected to handle online distribution but their system does leave a little room for improvement - Paragraph text looks slightly blurry when zoomed to a legible size, and copy and paste is disabled (making quotes difficult to share without re-keying). You cannot download a full copy for offline desktop searching as you can with GP+ and finally, because the content is built on Flash technology it won't work on your mobile at all.

These aren't deal-breaking issues though, and as ex-F1 test driver Karun Chandhok points out:

"autosport magazine is now readable online !! ok you have to subscribe but well worth it when in india...."

How can you argue with that? I do hope this isn't a one-off occurrence.

If you've had a chance to look around, do let us know what you think of the long running magazine's first foray into digital print. Is there room for improvement and will it change the way you consume your F1 news? I want more and I want it now.