So far, the only publisher participating is Hearst. There’s no set standard for how early a look each Newsstand issue will offer, Hearst told AllThingsD. The same report notes that Apple suggested this feature to Hearst, which leaves the possibility open that other publishers will eventually sign on.

Newsstand doesn’t have the widest selection of titles, nor the best reading experience for reading magazine titles on iOS. But the option to read some titles early is a good way to differentiate Apple’s own offering from competitors like the Zinio and Kindle apps.

One approach that has gotten a lot of attention, in part because it comes from former Tumblr designer and Instapaper founder Marco Arment, is an online and mobile magazine called simply The Magazine, which launched earlier this month. The simplicity of the name is reflected in the platform itself: Arment’s digital magazine, which is focused on long-form essays about technology and culture, has virtually none of the elements that we’ve come to associate with online or virtual magazines — it has no masthead or sidebars or boxes with interactive ads, no table of contents or sharing buttons or drop-down menus. In fact, it has virtually nothing but words and links (and some cool hyperlinked footnotes).

One of the reasons why The Magazine is able to strip down its reading experience so much is that it has no advertising of any kind: the content is subsidized solely by subscriptions, and Arment said recently that it is already financially sustainable — since it is being produced almost single-handedly, and therefore has an extremely low cost structure compared to traditional publishing. In that sense, it approaches what some have called “artisanal” publishing, and there is some good discussion of the pros and cons of that model in a Branch discussion that includes designer Jon Lax and NYT staffer Jeremy Zilar.

Simplify, simplify, simplify

From a design perspective, however, the simplicity of the app is its most interesting feature, in part because Arment seems to have approached it in a way that is the complete antithesis of traditional publishers: as he has described in his posts about the genesis of the project, he started it by thinking about what elements he really needed, and left everything else out. By contrast, most magazines and newspapers seem to ask themselves “How can we take all the stuff we already have and the things we already do, and squeeze them into this new container?” This process is fundamentally broken.

Designer Craig Mod looked at The Magazine and its design philosophy in a perceptive essay entitled “Subcompact publishing,” in which he compares what Arment did to the way that Honda disrupted the automotive business in North America, by providing something that fit the minimum needs of a large group of consumers. In a similar way, Mod argues, publishers need to stop thinking about all the things they can cram into a design on the web or a mobile device and start thinking about what developers and entrepreneurs call a “minimum viable product.”

“Business skeuomorphism happens when we take business decisions explicitly tied to one medium, and bring them to another medium — no questions asked. Business skeuomorphism is rampant in the publishing industry.”

There are already some great examples of content experiences that are trying for a “minimum viable product.” The Magazine is one, but so are lesser-known or more experimental features such as Evening Edition, which was created by designer Mike Monteiro and provides a heavily-curated selection of news and features designed to give readers an overview of the world in the same way a newspaper front page does (or used to). Another more recent entrant is a news site called TL;DR — internet slang for “too long, didn’t read” — which summarizes top stories in a more approachable way than traditional portals.

Let the content fit the experience, not the other way around

Other similar experiments include Summ.ly, a startup launched by a 16-year-old entrepreneur, which Om wrote about recently. It is also designed in as simple a way as possible, to take advantage of the limited time and screen real estate that mobile users often have when it comes to content consumption — something that is also a driving force behind Circa, the mobile news-aggregation app launched earlier this year by entrepreneur Matt Galligan and funded by Cheezburger empire CEO Ben Huh. And then there is the short-form, mobile reading experience offered by Tapestry, which was recently launched by New York-based incubator Betaworks based on a model pioneered by author Robin Sloan.

It’s worth noting that Twitter is a great example of the “minimum viable product” approach, both as a company and as a way of publishing content: not only is the restriction to 140 characters something that keeps Twitter from becoming cluttered with too much verbiage — the way other formats such as blogs can be — but the whole nature of the service itself was so simplified that in the beginning it wasn’t even clear to many people what it should be used for. That didn’t start to become obvious (even to the company’s founders, I would argue) until millions of people were using it, and even then many of the uses that the tool was put to came as a surprise.

This is part of the reason why some Twitter users are so concerned about the future of the platform, as it adds more content through features like its expandable “Cards” and seems determined to layer more and more functionality on top of the service. With any kind of publishing, there seems to be an almost irresistable temptation to continue adding more features and content and doo-dads until the original simplicity of the experience is lost, or at least significantly diluted.

Why aren’t more traditional publishers experimenting with features or services that are similar to Arment’s magazine, or Tapestry’s mobile approach, or a stripped-down experience like that offered by TL;DR or Circa? It’s not because they can’t — obviously they could if they wanted to. But as Craig Mod suggests in his essay, with reference to disruptive economics guru Clay Christensen, they don’t do this for the same reason North American auto-makers didn’t compete with Honda: they simply didn’t see it as a competitor until it was almost too late, because they had defined their business in the wrong way.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Arvind Grover

Newspapers get most of the press when it comes to the disruption of the mainstream media industry, but magazines are also struggling to find a digital model that works. Next Issue Media believes it has the answer — a Netflix or Hulu-style newsstand with all-you-can-read access to dozens of popular magazine titles from Condé Nast and other providers, which just launched for the iPad. But as appealing as it might be for magazine junkies, one of the biggest risks for Next Issue is that its distribution model doesn’t really fit with the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism.

As my paidContent colleague Laura Hazard Owen has described in her post on the launch of Next Issue’s iPad app (the Android version launched a couple of months ago), the company’s digital newsstand mimics the look of a traditional real-world newsstand, with the faces of popular magazines such as Esquire and Sports Illustrated displayed on virtual racks, where readers can click through and read them as though they were leafing through a real printed copy. Subscribers can get access to all of the bi-weekly and monthly magazines for $9.99 a month, or they can pay $14.99 for all that as well as weekly titles like Time and the New Yorker.

Do readers even want a digital newsstand?

The idea behind Next Issue is that magazine readers will be attracted to a pay-once, read-many model in the same way that many users pay for a subscription to TV shows and movies via Netflix or Hulu. But will they? Undoubtedly some will. But will those who do it be enough to make a difference to the bottom line of the magazines that take part? That’s a much bigger question. Obviously, incremental revenue from subscription sales through Next Issue and their own apps is better than nothing, but it’s unlikely to have a big effect on the bottom line, in part because the way people consume content is changing.

As I argued when Next Issue launched for Android, more and more people are finding the stories they want to read and the information they need to know through social channels, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook or social aggregators of various kinds. And it’s not just the young, or social-media junkies — those groups may be on the leading edge, but the broader trend becomes obvious whenever you look at studies of information-consumption patterns from the Pew Research Center or even the most recent report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. This is what some have called the “atomization of content.”

This trend, where users of services like Twitter and aggregators like Flipboard or Zite or Prismatic rely on their social graph and increasingly intelligent algorithms to find the content they want, just doesn’t fit with the model that Next Issue has in mind — where readers stand and look at the front covers of specific magazines and then drill down into one, then come back to the newsstand and choose another, and so on.

Publishers should be wary of paving cow paths

The technical term for reproducing what a physical object like a newsstand or a magazine looks like on a digital platform is “skeuomorphism” — the same principle that designers use when they show a virtual page turning as you flip through a magazine on your tablet. As John Bethune pointed out in the context of news-aggregator Journatic and its recent fake-byline scandal, this approach makes things seem familiar in some ways, but it also restricts new forms of content. Another term for this is “paving cow paths,” and while it may make things easier in the short term, it can be risky in the long term.

Sadly, my magazine habit is long-ago broken. This won't repair it: adage.com/article/media/…

—
Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) July 10, 2012

Next Issue isn’t the only one pursuing this kind of model: Robert Andrews at paidContent has written about a French distributor of digital magazines called Le Kiosk, whose app mimics a street vendor’s kiosk even more faithfully than Next Issue’s, since it is a actual three-dimensional model. The French service has over 600 titles from 120 publishers, and the company recently launched a UK version, although there is skepticism about whether it will catch on. One question for it and Next Issue: Will users want a cable-style offering that gives them many things they don’t want as well those they do want?

If Next Issue were to pull individual articles out of its magazines and collect them based on popularity or some other algorithm — or made it easy for readers to share individual articles and other content outside the walled garden of the app itself — that might make it more appealing to those who have gotten used to a Flipboard-style model for consuming content. But it’s not clear that magazine publishers would be interested in doing that. For them, the game is about increasing circulation figures so they can try to keep their advertising revenues from bottoming out as print-based revenue continues to decline.

The idea of a single newsstand where you can see all your favorite magazines is definitely going to attract some readers, especially those who want to come as close as possible to the stack of printed magazines they used to keep on their bedside table for browsing purposes. And it’s certainly appealing to publishers, since they get to try and recreate (or perpetuate) the print-based model and hopefully the advertising revenue that went along with it. But if your content-consumption behavior doesn’t lead you to stick to those kinds of well-worn cow paths, Next Issue probably isn’t even going to be on your radar.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Chelsea

The service, which carries more than 600 replica titles from 120 publishers in France, touts two main differentiators:

1. A user interface that majors on a “3D” street magazine newsstand.
2. Beside single-copy sales, a subscription offering 10 magazine replicas for  €10 or £10 per month.

Now it is launching in the UK with around 90 titles from BBC Worldwide, Dennis, the Daily Mail, IPC Media, Conde Nast and Tattoo Life. LeKiosk co-founder Michael Philippe tells paidContent:

“We are confident we could have maybe 200 titles in the next few months.”

But LeKiosk may be challenged to break out of its home turf:

• LeKiosk’s app, which will also come to Android soon, may accurately replicate the magazine kiosks which pepper French sidewalks, but these kiosks are far less common in the UK, making the idea just an interface gimmick.
• It goes up against a growing number of tablet magazine delivery options, including incumbent replica aggregator Zinio, which Philippe acknowledges is his main competitor, and the apps released directly by publishers.
• The upfront French branding is not necessarily desirable in the UK, and the ad video, which refers to “England” not not other UK nations, seems targeted more at LeKiosk’s French audience than Brits.

So, if LeKiosk has an advantage, it is surely the interesting bundle model, similar to NextIssue Media’s in the States, for which LeKiosk claims 25,000 subscribers and which appears to be a discovery driver:

“They usually read around seven magazines on average,” Philippe reveals. “The most interesting thing is, 85 percent of the subscribers read magazines that they would never have read before.

“We see it with Spotify in music and Netflix in movies – users want to have access to whichever magazine they want.”

LeKiosk splits any iOS sales 30 percent with Apple, 40 percent with publishers and keeps 30 percent for itself.

“We have reached 500,000 downloads on the app store in France with €1.5 million turnover last and estimated €6 million this year,” Philippe tells paidContent.

“The company raised around €3 million over the last few years. We are now also raising a new round. We are investing a lot for international development - profitability is not for 2012, maybe for 2013.

“Our second step is international development,” Philippe says. “We are starting with the UK because the iPad rate is very high – about three or four times more than in France. We are confident we will be launching in Italy in September, maybe in other countries in Europe in 2013.”

The outfit wants to replicate in the UK some French business relationships, which have given its app carriage on new Archos and Sony tablets and which have seen it get promotion from some publishers themselves.

Time will tell whether this French operator can gain a meaning foothold away from home.

Between March and October 2011, GfK MRI estimates that the total U.S. gross magazine audience (the number of consumer exposures to magazine-branded content on any platform, including print) was 1.58 billion. Of those, 135 million exposures were print + digital, and 166 million were digital-only. That digital-only group is made primarily of men (63 percent), and they’re more likely to be young, affluent and well-educated. The sample size for this survey was 12,546 people, and GfK MRI extrapolates its results to the entire U.S. adult population.

Digital magazine reading is likely to increase as digital newsstands become available on more devices. The Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) Newsstand, launched in October, has brought some magazine publishers a significant number of new readers. Conde Nast, for example, reported subscription sales across nine titles up 268 percent in the two weeks following the Newsstand’s launch. Kindle Fire has its own newsstand, now with all the major magazine publishers on board (Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX) was the last to jump on). And Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) sees the Nook Newsstand as one of its fastest-growing areas of digital content.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece referred to magazine readers, not exposures.

The feature is a new application that merely contains latest issues of titles that iPad or iPhone users have subscribed to or downloaded in iTunes Store’s app store, a bit like a dedicated version of a regular folder.

Magazines and newspapers are still apps; no change there. The Newsstand folder contains a link out to titles’ apps on iTunes Store. Discovery is still done on iTunes Store. This is not a massive step change, this is not quite Apple “saving newspapers”.

But participating titles can invoke automatic edition updates, so the fatter apps can beam new editions to subscribers overnight.

Publisher participation in Newsstand means their app editions are now displayed only in the Newsstand folder and not on iOS home screens as the distinct apps they are. The Economist is not participating in Newsstand.

• The Daily, Wired, Reader’s Digest and National Geographic were picked as featured U.S. publications inside Newsstand.

• Conde Nast has placed titles including Wired and GQ in the system.
• Associated Newspapers’ UK free commuter newspaper Metro on Wednesday replaced its digital replica PDF app with a proper iPad tablet app, built on Mobile IQ’s Press Run system, which plugs in to Metro’s production system. It will update automatically at 4am.
• Nomad Editions, which is led by former Newsweek president Mark Edmiston and already had a single iOS app to aggregate its five HTML-based tablet-only magazines, is upgrading its app to be Newsstand-compliant.
• Future Publishing (LSE: FUTR), whose digital magazine fortunes have surged from lowly desktop digital replica sales thanks to placing Zinio and app editions on iPad, has now turned much of its portfolio in to native iPad apps with Newsstand support.

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