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Time Inc. relents on digital magazine prices
For the past few months, Time Inc. has been at odds with Apple over magazine subscription models in the App Store. The publishing giant took a big step forward this week in announcing that People Magazine for the iPad will now be free for those who subscribe to the paper version, though that doesn't seem to address the company's initial complaint. Time's original intention was to have users download an app from the store and then pay them directly for future issues. Apple refused, forcing Time to sell single copies of the magazine. That's still the case for most customers, but subscribers can now consider a digital copy a part of their subscription. People is the first title to adopt this model, and its expected that other properties, like Fortune, will soon follow suit. In the end, subscribers are happy -- but the publishers still can't sell subscriptions through their apps. [via Apple 2.0]
Time Warner CEO hints at tying print, tablet magazine subscriptions together
We'd already heard that Time Warner was looking to offer magazine subscriptions on the iPad (and running into some difficulty doing so), and it now looks like it might have some even grander plans. As hinted at by Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes in an earnings call earlier today, the company is apparently looking at extending its TV Everywhere concept to magazines, which would give customers that subscribe to the print editions of Time, Sports Illustrated and other publications access to the digital version as well. Of course, Bewkes didn't offer any indication as to exactly when that might happen, but he did say that the "key to it all" is to give subscribers access to content "over all broadband devices as soon as possible," which is certainly promising.
Will we pay more for magazines on the iPad?
Business Insider has a post up from AdAge about magazine pricing on the iPad, and they've got bad news for anyone planning to transfer all of their magazine subscriptions to Apple's magical device: It'll cost ya. While a year's worth of Popular Mechanics goes for $12 from the publication's website (or even cheaper if you can pick it up from Amazon or that random kid wandering your subdivision selling subscriptions), the iPad subscription will cost $29.95; that's over twice as much. You can buy a year's worth of Wired on Amazon for just $10, but one issue on the iPad costs you half of that. Why? At first, the cost seems like a ripoff; publishers don't have to pay for paper, ink, or postage, so you'd think the content should actually be cheaper. Then you calculate in the cost of interactive designs and features, researching new technologies, and creating new workflows, and creating an iPad version of the magazine starts to get more expensive. Throw in that publishers are wary of pricing their content too low, and you get a higher price than a print subscription -- which plenty of readers will probably pay anyway. That's a pretty fragile pricing state, though; e-books are already cheaper than their print versions, and while comic books are the same price in the store as they are on something like the Marvel application, you have to think that those prices will drop too. As usual, early adopters will pay the most, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the price of "e-magazines" drop as publishers and consumers alike even out the rough edges of the transaction.
Popular Science magazine comes to the iPad
Mag+ live with Popular Science+ from Bonnier on Vimeo. The Mag+ digital magazine concept was first previewed in December, six weeks before Apple announced the iPad. Looks like their awesome concept just needed the right tech. Now Bonnier has released Popular Science+, the iPad edition of Popular Science magazine. Not content with just porting an issue's pages over to the iPad, Bonnier collaborated with BERG, a London-based design studio, and created Popular Science+ based on six design principles that rule their Mag+ philosophy. Their rules do a terrific job at explaining the difference between a magazine and a web page and what readers expect from a magazine that they don't expect from the web (magazines have a defined beginning and end, they have fewer distractions than the web, and are delivered on an issue-basis). The video above does a good job in showing how art directors are going to have to think outside the box to successfully transfer a print magazines to devices like the iPad. Popular Science+ for iPad is available now for $4.99.
Men's Health magazine comes to the iPad
Men's Health, the world's largest men's magazine with editions in 40 countries across the globe, has released the Men's Health iPad Edition. With each issue you get everything you'd get in the pages of the regular magazine, but the iPad edition gives you extra benefits including an "Enhanced View" interface that overlays icons on any given page to highlight a page's multimedia features including video of exercises, real-time Snap Polls, bookmarking, and Twitter and Facebook integration. In addition to a Table of Contents pop-up, there's also a Scrub pane feature that allows readers to quickly flip through the entire issue via a film-strip view. Interestingly enough, Men's Health say they will start making enhanced back issues available on the iPad. The iPad is creating a new market for digital magazines and publishers are going to go through a trial-and-error period for a few months to find out what readers want. Right now Men's Health is not offering a bundled print magazine and iPad edition. They do note that the iPad edition will be identical to the print edition, with the exception of adding the interactive features discussed above. If you are a current subscriber to the Men's Health print edition, you will need to purchase the iPad edition separately. What about a subscription for the iPad edition? Men's Health says for now you'll need to purchase each issue à la carte, but they hope to make digital subscriptions to the iPad edition available soon. Men's Health Magazine for iPad is a free app that gives you a 10-page preview of the April issue. Additional issues can be purchased for $4.99.
iPad apps: defining experiences from the first wave
There are now over 1,348 approved apps for the iPad. That's on top of the 150,000 iPad-compatible iPhone programs already available in the App Store. When Apple's tablet PC launches, just hours from now, it will have a software library greater than that of any handheld in history -- not counting the occasional UMPC. That said, the vast majority of even those 1,348 iPad apps are not original. They were designed for the iPhone, a device with a comparatively pokey processor and a tiny screen, and most have just been tweaked slightly, upped in price and given an "HD" suffix -- as if that somehow justified the increased cost. Besides, we've seen the amazing potential programs have on iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile and webOS when given access to a touchscreen, always-on data connection, GPS, cloud storage and WiFi -- but where are the apps that truly define iPad? What will take advantage of its extra headroom, new UI paradigms and multitouch real estate? Caught between netbook and smartphone, what does the iPad do that the iPhone cannot? After spending hours digging through the web and new iPad section of the App Store, we believe we have a number of reasonably compelling answers. Update: Now includes Wormhole Remote, TweetDeck, SkyGrid, Touchgrind HD, GoToMeeting, SplitBrowser, iDisplay, Geometry Wars and Drawing Pad.
WSJ on iPad for $17.99 a month, magazines to be at or near newsstand prices?
The Wall Street Journal is running a piece that focuses on ad sales for the iPad. Pretty boring stuff except for a few nuggets related to the actual content we crave. Rupert Murdoch already confirmed that his monument to main stream media was coming to the iPad. Hell, they've even been treated to a rare, in-house device to assist with the development of the iPad version of the Wall Street Journal. Now it's quoting "a person familiar with the matter" (wink) who says that The Journal plans to charge subscribers $17.99 per month for iPad subscriptions -- for comparison, the print version of the WSJ costs $349 for 52 weeks or about $29 per month. Not bad, but you can't roll up an iPad to swat the dog. Conversely, magazines appear set to offer weekly or monthly editions out of the gate, not annual subscriptions. Sources told the WSJ that the April issue of Hearst's Esquire magazine (no stranger to new media) will arrive in downloadable format without advertisements for $2.99, $2 less than the newsstand price, and will include five music videos (each containing the phrase "somewhere in Mississippi," oddly enough) to take advantage of the device's multimedia capabilities. On the other hand, a full iPad issue of Men's Health with match the glossy's $4.99 price. Of course, as we heard earlier, publishers will be experimenting with advertising and pricing models to see what works so expect things to be fluid for quite some time after the April 3rd launch.
Cynergy's magazine kiosk concept serves up digital content a la carte (video)
Not that we've never seen Surface-like touch tables interacting with mobile devices before, but now that the whole thing is being repackaged as "the magazine stand of the future" and those trendy tablets are involved, we might as well have a look. Cynergy is demonstrating a seamless method for purchasing digital content from one of these kiosks using your e-reader or tablet pc. It's just a matter of plopping your device -- which already knows your identity and available credit -- atop the display table and then flicking the particular magazine or newspaper you want onto your storage. It looks effortless and all, but it also requires that you have the "custom designed and built" software from Cynergy, which you'll have to pump funds into in order to get the seamlessness going. We don't know how we feel about yet another proprietary ecosystem floating about, but you can make your own mind up after watching the video after the break.
Condé Nast reveals initial list of iPad magazines
As we move closer to the iPad's release date, more information is becoming available regarding 3rd-party content. Just this week, an internal memo from Condé Nast revealed the list of the first of the magazines that will be initially available for the device. They are: GQ Vanity Fair Wired Glamour The New Yorker Expect GQ to be the first one available, either at or directly after the iPad's launch. Vanity Fair and Wired should be available in June, while launch schedules for Glamour and The New Yorker are unclear. Condé Nast's editorial director, Thomas Wallace, noted that there's an experimental aspect to releasing these publications for the iPad. These titles will be used to test pricing and advertising strategies. It won't be easy, as distribution will be handled via iTunes, and Apple doesn't share reader data. Last week, we saw what may be a list of the books that will be available for purchase at launch, including bestselling fiction, non-fiction and autobiography titles. iBooks is going to be a huge part of the iPad, and at this point we can't wait to get it started.
All but one Future publication saw circulation dip in 2009
[Image credit: benben] Can you guess which of Future Publishing's nine magazines didn't lose readership in 2009? If your money was with Edge, you've got our permission to give yourself a nice big pat on the back. Go ahead, we'll wait. Done? Good. Like we were saying, the UK game mag publisher saw shrinking circulation numbers in 2009 -- the same year that saw the closure of PlayStation World by Future and the shuttering of long-running US gaming mag EGM by Ziff-Davis. While Edge circulation numbers rose by (a somewhat meager) 109 readers, Games Master dropped by 6,636 (to 34,313), PC Zone by 7,666 (to 11,357), and Xbox World 360 by 5,156 (to 25,874). While those numbers might seem a bit on the low side, that has more to do with the smaller size/population of the UK than anything else (though, of course, dropping readership numbers don't mean good things for any publication house). According to the GamesIndustry.biz report, Future blames the circulation drops on "slowing sales and ad spend [advertisers spending on print advertising]." We've dropped the entire list of circulation numbers after the break (care of the UK Audit Bureau of Circulations), should you be so inclined to peruse all the stats.
iPad in the family: What it'll take
When Steve Jobs announced the iPad, I thought it was neat, but I didn't see how it would really fit into my life. What could it do for me that my iPhone or MacBook Pro couldn't? It seemed like that gap Steve Jobs said the iPad filled was targeted at a group of people I didn't belong to. So I asked the TUAW readers if you'd be getting one. Then I began talking to my family about the iPad and discovered some surprising things: the very people I thought would never buy one plan to, and the people I thought would jump at it are holding off. So here's a rundown of four very different people in my family and if/why they will be getting an iPad: Person: My mother. 62. Queen of the Luddites. Computer proficiency: Absolutely none. Will she be getting the iPad? Yep. The 16GB 3G model. Why? My mom has never owned a computer. She doesn't have an internet connection. She couldn't explain to you what Facebook is. And she refers to my iPhone as "that information device."
Why 4:3?
Kirk McElhearn over at Macworld has attempted to answer the very first question I've had since I first heard that the iPad wasn't going to be in a widescreen format: Why 4:3? The answer: because for the majority of things you'll be using your iPad for, that's the right resolution you'll want. Magazines, books, the web, productivity, and so on, McElhearn argues that 4:3 is the right way to go. Of course, taste plays a factor in there -- I prefer to browse the Internet on a widescreen monitor, actually, and I think games, which I'll be playing a lot of on my iPad when I eventually get one, tend to work better with a wider field of view. And let's be honest, the 4:3 ratio only allows Apple to start small and go with an "iPad XL" or an "iPad HD" in the future, widening the screen and perhaps even upping the resolution. But McElhearn makes a good point that the 4:3 ratio has been Apple's home until only just recently, and for most objects that you hold in your hands and read like the iPad, from magazines to newspapers, the 4:3 ratio still fits. The ratio likely won't affect sales at all, but we'll have to see if movie watchers hold out for a better format for their media.
Where's the iMag store?
You know, at first I wasn't so impressed with the iPad, but the more I thought about the ways in which you can use it, the more excited I got. As a piece of leisure technology - something you just have laying around your living room like a newspaper - it's a lot more user friendly than a laptop or an iPhone. However, I don't think the iPad is revolutionary. By now we're well familiar with multi-touch devices and apps stores. And let's face it, ebooks are nothing new. The iBooks app isn't going to be breaking any ground, but you know what would? An iMag store. Sure, there're sites like emagazines.com that offer browser-based magazines, but there's no one universal storefront for emagazines that's easy to use. Even Zinio doesn't make the emagazine buying experience as easy or pleasurable as buy a song from the iTunes store. Can you imaging what an iMag app might be like? Bjørn Rybakken, creative director at Tangram Design, an Oslo based design agency, sent me these mock-ups (and you guys know how I love mock-ups) which got me thinking what the iMag store might be like.
National Geographic shoves every morsel of its collection onto 160GB HDD
Care to get up close and personal with Niihau? How's about an overview of Tuvalu? Surely you need a helicopter shot of Pakatoa Island to get your morning started right, yeah? If so, and you're too lazy to hit up the World Wide Web, there's a better-than-average chance that an older National Geographic magazine has exactly the elixir you're searching for. Problem is, sifting through every single issue since 1888 takes a fair bit of time -- time you'd rather be spending in an obnoxiously long security line as you await your flight to Ushuaia. Thanks to "modern technology" and "storage innovations," said quandary can now be resolved quite simply. Nat Geo is offering every last piece of information it has ever published on a portable 160GB HDD, and amazingly 100GB is free for you to manually add to the collection. Too bad this $199.95 device wasn't available before Christmas, but hey, at least you've now got something to blow those Santa Bucks on.
'iGuide' another rumored tablet/service name from Apple
"iSlate" isn't the only less-than-exciting name that Apple may be considering for their rumored upcoming tablet release. MacRumors has uncovered another possible trademarked name for the new device: iGuide. They found what appears to be a shell company created by Apple a while back (December 2007, around the same time that the iSlate trademark was filed) designed to trademark the name "iGuide" for a new device or service. The purpose of said service? To browse, transmit and play many types of multimedia content, including videos, audio, movies, photos, and even electronic publications like books, magazines, and blogs. Obviously, this is a pretty vague stab in the dark, but paired with recent rumors that the new tablet will include some Kindle or Nook-style reader functionality, iGuide could certainly be a delivery service for the new device, sort of an iTunes but for all kinds of media, designed to deliver content directly to the reader. We're just giving out ideas here -- as I said yesterday, this thing isn't real until it is. But the possibilities are very interesting for sure. [If you want to see more speculation and prognostication around the tablet in convenient video format, check out Mike R.'s appearance on Fox Business News earlier today.]
Blio seeks to take digital reading in a new, more inclusive, and colorful direction
As if we didn't have enough pretenders in the ebook space, here's Ray Kurzweil with a new format of his own and a bagful of ambition to go with it. Set for a proper unveiling at CES in a week's time, the Blio format and accompanying application are together intended to deliver true-to-life color reproductions of the way real books appear. Interestingly, the software has been developed in partnership with Nokia, in an effort to turn Espoo's phones into "the smallest text-to-speech reading devices available thus far," though apps are also being developed for the iPhone, PC and Mac. The biggest advantage of this format might actually be behind the scenes, where the costs to publishers are drastically reduced by them having to only submit a PDF scan of their books, whose formatting remains unchanged in Blio. We'll be all over this at CES, but for now you'll find more pictures and early impressions over at Gizmodo.
EGM relaunches with April issue, explains digital content
EGM Media this morning announced the distribution of its upcoming magazine via an "agreement" with Time/Warner Retail Sales and Marketing (former EGM/Ziff Davis Media distributor), alongside intentions to release its first issue with an April cover. Though no specific date was given other than "March 2010" for the newsstand re-launch of Electronic Gaming Monthly, the press release detailed the "weekly interactive version of the magazine," named "EGMi: The Digital Magazine" (rolls right off the tongue!). Accessed by a "special code" included with each issue, the digital extension of the magazine will be made up of "exclusive article extensions and original content." Also of note, game previews and reviews will make up at least part of the premiere issue, with notorious rumor-monger Quartermann, ex-EIC Dan "Shoe" Hsu (as previously announced), and prankster Sean "Seanbaby" Reiley all contributing content as well. Publisher and prez of EGM Media, Steve Harris, claimed the digital content "is complementary to the print magazine" and gives editors "a way to communicate with our readers and update the print product in an ongoing manner." We'll see how his claims play out when the magazine arrives this March.
Magazine publishers announce joint digital distribution scheme
The joint venture between four leading publishers has issued a press release highlighting a few of the finer points of its plan to create a platform for digital magazine distribution -- we guess that The New York Observer wasn't kidding when it said that a deal between Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corporation, and Time Inc. was imminent. Essentially a vehicle for selling publications for just about any device (including smartphones, e-readers, and laptops), the content will be optimized for multiple operating systems and display sizes, and according Time exec John Squires, it will all be DRM-free. They've yet to announce a name for this beast -- although we're leaning towards Magulu (or, perhaps, the iMags Store). PR after the break.
Major media giants to form joint venture for digital future, says WSJ
News Corp, Time Inc., Condé Nast Publications Inc., Hearst Corp., and Meredith Corp. If this Wall Street Journal report is to be believed here, these five major media firms are preparing to announce a new joint venture tomorrow to "prepare print publications for a new generation of electronic readers and other digital devices." Details are a bit sketchy here, and what makes it more interesting / confounding is that many of these companies already have or have showcased separate initiatives, such as Hearst's Skiff and tablet demos from both Time and Condé Nast. We'll be eager to find out if there are any devices the group rallies behind (or even produces itself), but one thing's for sure: good old Rupert Murdoch will have something fun to say on the matter.
Magazine publishers said to be 'very close' to digital distribution deal
Rumors of magazine publishers striking a deal to make their content available for digital devices -- even a certain tablet -- have been around for quite a while now, but it looks like something may finally be close to really happening. As The New York Observer reports, Time Inc. exec John Squires has been taking the lead on the initiative (and is apparently set to become interim head of the new company), which would see rival publishers including Time, Condé Nast and Hearst join together to make over 50 magazines available in digital form, and for a variety of devices. Details are otherwise a bit light, as you might expect, but one source familiar with the situation reportedly says "it's very close and more imminent than it's been," while others familiar with the plans say they "compare to iTunes," and that you'll be able to buy "new and distinct iterations" of magazines like of The New Yorker or Time -- and even actual print editions, for that matter.
