Condé Nast wants to lead iPad pack
When the Apple iPad gets off the ground next month, Condé Nast Publishing plans to be blasting off in unison with it, offering five magazines for the new tablet computer from Cupertino as quickly as possible.
Condé Nast Publishing is one of those who feels that the Apple iPad is at least a big part of the answer to the myriad problems of the publishing industry, magazine division. To that end, they have identified the first five magazines which will be available on the iPad when it is released next month, or soon after: Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour. Although those first five are to be rolled out as quickly as it can be done, only GQ is going to be ready for shipment at the time of the maiden sailing of the iPad. According the a ZDNet blog, all of this news comes from an email received by the New York Times as a part of an “internal†announcement.
The email apparently contains no news of pricing, which would seem to be a big part of the strategy involved in having your magazines saved by the iPad. All that is really known so far is that the Condé Nast publications will be offered in the iTunes store, or perhaps a book and magazine equivalent, and that both Apple and Condé Nast are going to try to work out the best pricing/subscription policies by some combination of black magic and experimentation. Well, and now we know that Condé Nast and its president, Charles H. Townsend, wish to take what he calls “a leadership position†in the iPad (and general electronic) publishing industry.
The publishing industry has been hit hard by the global recession, and was in poor shape even before economic hard times hit. This is especially true in the newspaper business, in which a number of iconic publications have gone under. The magazine arena, though, is running a close and desperate second. It seems like a far stretch for a single device such as the iPad to lead a charge that will save an entire industry, especially when newspapers are still quibbling over the basics, magazines don’t know how much to charge, and book publishers are in price wars with Amazon. Time will tell.
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March 1st, 2010
I sure hope the iPad is a success, even though I have never owned an Apple product, yet. And I also hope that something saves publishing. My Chicago Tribune is getting narrower and narrower and thinner and thinner. Nice article Michael.