The NewsStand app for iOS devices may soon receive some pretty tough competition, if a cohort of magazine publishers have their way. Next Issue Media, a joint collaboration of five major US magazine publishers (Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc.) have submitted an app called Next Issue to Apple for review in the hope that it will soon be approved. The app offers many of the existing magazines from NewsStand, but instead of charging users a monthly subscription for each individual magazine, the new service will charge a set fee of $9.99 per month for the basic, or $14.99 per month for the premium, for unlimited access to all magazines.
The publishers control a significant number of high impact and widely circulated publications. These include, but are not limited to, Elle, Esquire, GQ, Fortune, Time, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, EW, People, Wired, Golf Digest and Bon Appétit. The Next Issue subscription model, offers many of these publications for the set monthly fee, a model that could be particularly attractive to those users who subscribe to more than one magazine using NewsStand.
The service is essentially the Spotify of the digital publishing world and currently offers 32 titles, but the selection is expected to expand later in the year. The app will also allow subscriptions to individual magazines as well as the ability to purchase individual magazine issues. In addition, a 30 day free trial is available now (note that the app hasn’t been released for the iPad yet, so unless you have another tablet device, there’s no point in starting the trial now).
Take a look at the website here. This could offer some interesting competition.
Competitive…