If you’ve been having trouble keeping up with Angelina, Brad and Jen on your iPad, then today is a day for rejoicing. People magazine has launched its iPad app, and its Sandra Bullock cover story (“The sexy single mom happily moves on – as ex Jesse James is spotted in Vegas with another woman,” etc.) looks very slick on it, too.
Why does this matter? First, consumer magazines don’t come bigger than People, so this will be a big test of the theory that tablet devices, with their page-flicking qualities and glossy rendering of images, hold particular promise for magazines.
But Rich Greenfield at BTIG Research has spotted something equally significant: existing print subscribers to the Time Inc-owned publication will be able to access People on the iPad for no extra cost.
That has been the case from the start for certain newspaper apps, but to date magazine subscribers have had to download each individual issue from the iTunes store, to the great frustration of publishers (and consumers) alike.
“Apple essentially wanted the magazine subscription process to go through their iTunes system to harvest the user data, rather than allowing it to go through the magazine’s subscription database,” Greenfield explains. Time Inc declined to comment on its discussions with Apple (most companies do), but Greenfield sees the change of heart as “a notable win for the magazine industry.”
Before we get too gushy (“Sandra’s new joy!”), though, remember that Apple has a habit of reviewing these things on an app-by-app basis, so there is no guarantee that all future titles will get the People treatment, and that Cupertino has not budged an inch on the publishers’ big beef – the ability to subscribe to multiple copies, rather than having to download each separately.
