Some U.S. publishers leap on Apple's new iOS newsstand feature

"It's kind of like having the paper delivered to your front door. Only better."-- from the Apple website, referring to a feature in its new iOS --  a virtual newsstand which lets readers access magazines and newspapers quickly on iPods and iPads and alerts them automatically when a new issue is available.According to a story on Folio:,  When viewing the Newsstand in iTunes, some featured titles

Staff-written magazine archives can be repackaged and re-sold as "collections"

A new revenue opportunity may be open to magazines which can repackage their archival material into iPad-only collections, according to a story about The New Yorker, published by Reuters. At the Ballpark, a collection of staff-written baseball writing from 1929 to 2011, features John Updike, David Grann and the inimitable Roger Angell. The revenue came from sponsorship by United Airlines. There

iPad magazine adoption is a little bit of history repeating itself: CJR

The adoption of iPad magazines is following a similar trajectory to that of other major publishing formats going back generations, says a story from the Columbia Journalism Review, cautioning that looking at falling sales figures over a short span doesn't really reflect the longer-term impacts.iPad magazines are not stumbling for the exact same reasons that the first books, print magazines, or “

Publication engagement said to be much higher on an app than on a website

Word from Britain is that readers spend more time reading a publication using apps on a tablet than on the publication's own website. A story from paidContent.org  about research by Tiger Spike says that tablet users spend an average of 30 to 34 minutes on the sites it has developed for clients such as the Telegraph Media Group, The Economist, the Australian and the Mail Online. It also found

Preview of Next Issue Media digital newsstand for U.S. titles now online

A consortium of five major U.S. magazine publishers who formed Next Issue Media in 2009 have finally unveiled their "digital newsstand". According to a story in MediaDailyNews, a preview is available exclusively on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.0, but will be introduced as a standalone app later this year.Next Issue Media was formed by Conde Nast, Hearst Corp., Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc. with

Cheaper, faster, bigger volume: is this really the way to go with magazines?

The announcement this week that future subscribers to The New Yorker will be offered a package including both the print and iPad edition in the U.S. for $69.99 is an indication that the publisher Condé Nast hopes to make up for lower consumer prices digitally with higher volumes of circulation. David Carr in the New York Times says this may well double the circulation of The New Yorker, but at

Time Inc. and Apple make a deal: print subscribers get iPad editions free

Time Inc. and Apple Inc. have apparently come to an arrangement about serving its existing subscribers on the iPad. It was reported today from multiple sources that this breaks an impasse between the two companies that may augur well for all magazines being delivered to subscribers on tablets. (It doesn't yet solve the problem of selling new subscriptions for iPads and retaining access to

Inflights flying high with iPad versions of seat pocket magazines

That venerable category, the in-flight magazine, is still going strong but many publishers are putting them up on tablets such as the iPad. A story in the blog Jaunted lists some of the airlines that are putting their custom magazines on iTunes-available iPads:United Continental -- Hemispheres
 Lufthansa -- Magazin 
Malaysia Airlines -- Going Places
TAP Portugal  -- Up 
Sky Mall 
 [h/t to Arjun

Wall Street Journal tops 200,000 tablet subscriptions for the paper, worth $41.5 million

As but one indicator of the growth of digital uptake by the public, it has been reported by MediaDailyNews that The Wall Street Journal has sold 200,000 digital subscriptions for tablet devices. The subs, 75% of which were sold in the last year, seem to have benefited from the launch of Apple's iPad.WSJ's audience is quite specialized and is in particularly high demand. It is one of the few

iPad magazine apps growing, just not quite so fast

The addition of magazine apps onto the iPad have gone up 10-fold since last April. The pace of growth, however, has slowed between January and February, something that the Association of Magazine Media (MPA), which released the study, attributes to post-holidays lassitude. The data is gathered by iMonitor, a tracking system developed for MPA by McPheters & Company to track the addition of apps

Rogers Publishing chose U.S. agency Built by the Factory to create iPad app

Does anyone else find it interesting that Rogers Publishing turned to a U.S. firm to develop its iPad app for Maclean's magazine, launched last month? We know this because of a release issued by the interactive agency, Built by the Factory. (There was no mention of the developers in the original Maclean's press release.)“As soon as we got our hands on the iPad last spring, we knew we were

Fast out of the gate, iPad magazine sales slowing by the first turn

After an initial flurry of sales, particularly for Wired magazine, which was first out of the gate, iPad magazine app sales have, um, plummeted. The chart is from Silicon Valley Insider and shows the sales of four leading Conde Nast titles (CN being one of the most aggressive investors in iPad apps.) Whether the reported "digital newsstand" that Apple is promising will goose up sales remains to

Virgin to announce rival iPad paper to Murdoch's The Daily

Richard Branson, an aggressive entrepreneur on several fronts, has announced that his company Virgin will unveil a custom-built iPad magazine in New York next week. According to a story in the Guardian, the new paper will be more entertainment and less current affairs than the impending launch of the similar iPad paper The Daily being hustled to market by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (in

Tablet market may be growing, but it's "nascent", says Nielsen study

Survey results released by The Nielsen Company is a sharp reminder of how small the tablet market is right now, though holding out some promise. A story published by Folio: says the study was an attempt to review how people are using their mobile devices such as smartphones, e-readers, iPads and the like. The survey found, when it polled 5,000 device owners, that only 4 per cent owned tablet

More than three times the time spent reading mags on iPads as on iPhones, study says

iPad users read magazines more than three times as much than they did on an iPhone, according to a Nielsen study on connected devices, reported on the site gigaOm.This should probably not be surprising, given the teeny screens on phones, but it is encouraging information for magazine publishers hoping that their online apps will build new business and readeship.The study also said that 43% of

Wired magazine sells as many paid iPad apps as it sells on the newsstand

From the iPad magazine watch desk:Wired magazine's iPad app is so popular (73,000 downloads @ US$4.99 in 9 days) that it nearly eclipses the magazine's newsstand sales, according to a posting on eMedia Vitals. 
Popular Science has sold 39,000 iPad issues since April
iPad owners are spending at least 60 minutes with each issue
Vanity Fair, Time and Men's Health have so far declined to release

Advertisers, for now, willing to pay up to 5x more for spots on publishers' iPad apps

Advertisers are apparently willing to pay up to five times as much to buy ad slots on publishers' iPad applications as they are for regular website advertising, according to an AP story. This doesn't mean Apple's tablet computer will live up to its hype as a potential lifeline for the media industry. Online ads still generate a small fraction of news companies' advertising revenue, and it's an