Publishing rivals could bring magazines to iPhone
The three largest magazine publishers in the U.S.are apparently joining forces to produce what’s been dubbed “iTunes for magazines”. The plan is for a single outlet, appearing on multiple devices, for buying subscriptions to digital editions of the titles.
The reported deal includes Conde Nast, Hearst and Time Inc along with smaller players such as Meredith. As well as working on a single Web site for purchases, the publishers would work together to agree a standard digital format for the magazines. As well as appearing on Web sites, there could be versions for the iPhone, BlackBerry and electronic readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.
The big drawback with the proposals is that most of the magazines in question are already available free of charge online in some form. Removing the Web site editions or making them pay-only would be unpopular and make it tougher to sell online ads.
It’s also far from proven that people are willing in any great number to pay a healthy amount to read a publication in portable digital form. For example, the subscriptions for magazines on the Kindle can cost as little as ten percent of the cover price of the printed edition.
One smart element of the proposed deal is that the published appear to have realized that the average reader doesn’t care who publishes a magazine, instead being solely concerned with the title itself. Bringing together the entire ranges in a single outlet would be a smaller-scale version of the cultural change that’s emerged in TV with personal video recorders such as TiVo where viewers often don’t care or even need to know what station a show is broadcast on.
Another potential benefit, if costs are kept low enough, is that the publishers could pick up more impulsive purchases. At the moment most magazines only sell to people who happen to be browsing at a newsstand or grocery store and see an eye-catching cover line. If the publishers get their titles into existing app stores as well as their own system, there are far more opportunities for a reader to give a magazine a try.
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