Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Reading Newspapers and Magazines
People in the newspaper business know that it's been tough sledding in recent years. The Internet, as
it has in so many areas, has proved to be a disruptive force in media.
It remains to be seen what role Apple generally, and the iPad specifically, will play in the future of
electronic periodicals or in helping to turn around sagging media enterprises. It's also uncertain
which pricing models will make the most sense from a business perspective.
What we can tell you is that reading newspapers and magazines on the iPad is not like reading news-
papers and magazines in any other electronic form. The experience is really slick, but only you can
decide whether it's worth paying the tab (in the cases where you do have to pay).
You have two paths you might follow to subscribe to or read a single issue of a newspaper or
magazine. The first path includes several fine publishing apps worth checking out, including
USA
TODAY
(where Ed works),
The Wall Street Journal, TIME
magazine,
The New York Times, The
New Yorker, Reuters News Pro, BBC News, Vanity Fair,
and
Popular Science.
We also highly re-
commend fetching the free Zinio app, which offers more than 5,000 digital publications including
Rolling Stone, The Economist, Macworld, PC World, Car and Driver, Maxim, National Geographic
Interactive, Spin, Bloomberg Businessweek,
and many more. You can buy single issues of a
magazine or subscribe, and you can sample and share some articles without a subscription.
In some cases, you have to pay handsomely or subscribe to some of these newspapers and
magazines, which you find not in the iBooks Store but in the regular App Store, which we cover in
Chapter
11
. You also see ads (somebody has to pay the freight).
The second path, Newsstand, was new in iOS 5. This handy icon on your Home screen purports to
gather all your newspaper and magazine subscriptions in a single place. Newsstand is actually a spe-
cial type of folder rather than an app.
You purchase subscriptions in a section of the App Store, which you can also get to by tapping
Newsstand on your Home screen and then tapping the Store button, which opens the App Store (see
Chapter
11
) to the new Subscriptions section.
Numerous publications have adopted the Newsstand paradigm, though some choose custom apps or
Zinio, and many do both.
