Magazines

Reading magazines and newspapers is an amazing experience the new iPad thanks to its retina display. Newsstand is Apple's built-in way or ogranize and manage all your issues and subscriptions, so your magazines and newspapers are where you want, when you want. They'll even download over night so new editions are ready for you right when you wake up!

Justin Williams from Carpeaqua breaks down the egregiously horrible user experience involved in just trying to get an issue of GQ, Esquire, or Sports Illustrated magazine loaded on the iPad.

Reading magazines on the iPad is an exercise in frustration. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. As great a device and, more importantly, platform as Apple has created, magazine publishers have done nothing short of fumble the snap in their own end zone.

Williams provides a list of 10 things publishers can do to help improve things, and it's a good list but it doesn't address the core problem -- publishers are the wrong people to fix it.

Time Inc. has announced they plan to bring all of their 21 US magazine titles to iPad and other tablets by year's end.

“Now is the time for us to make this bold commitment. In the coming year, there will clearly be many more consumers using tablets, accelerating demand for content and driving advertiser interest. We are putting ourselves in a great position to take advantage of these opportunities,” said Maurice Edelson, EVP and a member of Time Inc.’s interim management committee. “Having our entire portfolio available on tablets will create a significant new digital reach for our advertisers.”

Many print newspapers and magazines jumped on board with Apple's subscription model for the iPad, last week, which was surprising because publishers have always been concerned about being unable to gather information from their customers because Apple requires the subscriber to opt into releasing this information. It turns out that many customers are actually agreeing to share their demographic data.