IPad serves big magazine banquet
MOVIE fans have Netflix. For music lovers, there's Spotify. So why not an all-you-can-eat service for magazine readers?
Now there is one: Next Issue, a new iPad app offering unlimited access to a growing number of well-known titles for a single monthly fee. Despite its cost, and some significant limitations, many avid readers will find it a godsend.
With their size and vivid graphics, magazines are arguably the print medium that should be most easily adaptable to the world of tablets. And there are already several ways to acquire them, including Zinio, which allows you to subscribe to thousands of titles worldwide, and Apple's own Newsstand.
Those services, though, generally require that you subscribe to each title individually, either on the tablet or a print version that also provides digital access.
By contrast, Next Issue – which launched an early version on Android tablets last spring while it prepped for its debut on the big iPad stage – gives you everything it's got for a flat fee. A plan that includes monthlies and bi-weeklies costs US$ 10 a month, while US$ 15 gets you weeklies too.
One catch is that "everything it's got" isn't yet all that much: only 39 titles so far, with archives only going back to the start of 2012. But those 39 include a lot of the biggies: Time, Vanity Fair, People, The New Yorker and Vogue, just to name a few.
Regular reading
And Next Issue – whose backers include Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, News Corp and Time Warner – promises to have at least 70 titles by the fall.
I certainly found more than enough to keep me occupied with the likes of Sports Illustrated, Wired and others on my regular-read list. It was also easy to dip into titles I don't usually look at – Car & Driver, Esquire – and I ended up spending considerably more time reading magazines than I normally do, a thought that surely warms the hearts of publishers and their advertisers.
The Next Issue app superimposes a consistent navigation scheme on top of all its magazines, including a table of contents and a carousel view that lets you rapidly flip through the pages.
That consistency is useful because each magazine has its own individual navigation as well, and they're all over the place.
Just one example: In some titles, like Entertainment Weekly, you page through an article by swiping side to side, while in Vanity Fair, you swipe up and down. Similarly, the presence or absence of multimedia extras is entirely a function of the individual title.
Personal library
When you log into Next Issue, you'll see thumbnail covers of all the available titles. Pressing and holding one adds it to your personal library, giving you a view of only those titles you want to follow.
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