Like so many others, I had great hopes that the iPad would bring about a major change to the world of magazines, as they pushed incredible and innovative content out to tablets. The reality? Not so much, instead we’re faced with bloated monthly downloads, and lackluster subscriptions. Now, a group of major publishers have decided to take another approach, offering unlimited magazines for a monthly charge, a Netflix style model. Dubbed Next Issue, it features magazines by Hearst, Meredith, Time Inc. and Conde Nast, with subscriptions costing $9.99 for monthly titles, and $14.99 for monthly and weekly. The titles available as of now are:
- Allure
- All You
- Better Homes and Gardens
- Car and Driver
- Coastal Living
- Condé Nast Traveler
- Cooking Light
- Elle
- Entertainment Weekly
- Esquire
- Essence
- Fitness
- Fortune
- Glamour
- Golf
- Health
- InStyle
- Money
- People
- People en Español
- People Style Watch
- Popular Mechanics
- Real Simple
- SI for Kids
- Southern Living
- Sports Illustrated
- Sunset
- The New Yorker
- This Old House
- Time
- Vanity Fair
There’s only an Android version of the app right now, but according to AllThingsD, an iPad version is expected this summer. Unfortunately, you can bet this doesn’t fix some of the major problems with magazine subscriptions on the iPad — most obviously the huge filesizes.
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This really solves nothing as there are too few titles. In fact, I debate even posting it here as there is no iOS version available.
Until I can get all magazines, in one place, buying magazines on the ipad (or phone) is not convenient.
From a cost perspective, I expect magazine vendors to start paying for the data needed to download their issues.
$12 gets me a paper subscription delivered to my home. The average digital issue is over 500 megs which eats up my data limit in no time. Six issues and my 3GB limit is gone.