e-magazines
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The Daily staff offers a musical goodbye
Goodbye to The Daily, the ill-fated iPad news magazine that was launched with great fanfare in 2011 and will shut down tomorrow. Some of The Daily's staff will migrate to The New York Post. Most will be let go. The Daily staff produced a farewell video to say goodbye to their readers (featuring plenty of Macs). Although I didn't find the content of The Daily very compelling, it's going to be a tough holiday for the staff who were let go. Hope they will find something quickly and put their talents to good use. The Daily app is already out of the App Store.
Next Issue offers all-you-can-read iPad magazine store
It's being called kind of a Netflix for magazines, and the description is apt. Five top U.S. publishers have gotten together to provide an iPad app that lets you read a great variety of magazines at a price of U.S. $9.99-$14.99 per month. The new company is called Next Issue and it's a rather bold idea. The publishers are Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc. Magazines included in the 'Unlimited Basic plan' at $9.99 are All You, Allure, Better Homes and Gardens, Bon Appétit, Brides, Car and Driver, Coastal Living, Condé Nast Traveler, Cooking Light, ELLE, Esquire, Essence, Fitness, Fortune, Glamour, Golf, Golf Digest, GQ, Health, InStyle, Money, Parents, People en Español, People StyleWatch, Popular Mechanics, Real Simple, Self, Southern Living, Sports Illustrated Kids, Sunset, This Old House, Vanity Fair, Vogue and Wired. The Unlimited Premium plan, which is $14.99, has all the above titles plus weeklies and back issues of Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker and Time. More magazines will be added over time, and the company will no doubt try to interest other publishers to join in. "Customers will see their magazines come to life in spectacular fashion," said John Loughlin, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Hearst Magazines. "Next Issue for iPad delivers an immersive and engaging experience, while the technology seems to disappear and get out of the way." The company says 30-day free trials are available for all subscription plans and print subscribers can add digital editions of the same titles for free or a nominal cost. If you want the free trial you can't do it from within the app. You must go to nextissue.com. You give them a credit card number, and if you don't cancel you'll start getting billed after your free month. Not my favorite way of doing a free trial, but there you are. I gave the app a try and signed up for the trial. There's a good selection of magazines, but more than half were of no interest to me. Even then, the pricing is pretty good and quite a bit below what I considered some of the extortionate pricing for electronic magazine subscriptions before Next Issue came on the scene. If you're a voracious reader, I think Next Issue is certainly worth the free trial, and kudos to the companies involved for trying something new and more reasonably priced.
Wired does a first iPad edition: It rocks, but costs too much
This is what e-magazines should have always been. A sparkling layout, embedded animations, video and audio. Compared to what Wired has done, the other magazines offered, like Time and Popular Science, feel pretty much like tarted up PDF files. Adobe created the translation for the iPad for Conde Nast, publisher of Wired. Originally, it was going to be Flash based, but when Steve Jobs put the clamps on that, Adobe re-did everything in Apple-approved Objective-C. Wired for iPad, released today, is a dazzler. There are 3D renderings you control by moving your hand, videos that look crisp, and some interactive features that are very helpful in getting a full understanding of the subject matter. I especially enjoyed the tour of the Mars missions, the tribute to the Industrial Light and Magic special effects factory, and the interactive view of what is inside Worcestershire sauce. Many of the ads are interactive as well, finally giving readers a reason to learn more about a product. %Gallery-93744%
