In the partnership with Wired, Target will offer “a custom-curated assortment of consumer electronics and gadgets” endorsed by Wired editors. The selections fall into four categories: Digital music, digital photos, productivity and body. Eleven of the products — including the Square credit card reader and Belkin WeMo switch — will appear in Wired-branded displays in Target’s 1,800 stores, and an expanded selection, including Fitbit products (see disclosure), is online at target.com/wired.

Wired gets a small percentage of sales revenue from the products, according to AdWeek, and the promotion will last for 12 weeks. ”We’re trying to push Wired out and beyond the four conventional walls of how it’s been defined its first twenty years,” Howard Mittman, VP and publisher of Wired, told AdWeek. “The ability to cross-pollinate opens [Target] up to affluent young men, and we get the opportunity to tap into their scale.”

Fitbit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of GigaOM/paidContent. (Om Malik, founder of GigaOM, is also a venture partner at True.)

Williams and Stone re-launched Obvious Corp. in June 2012 after they both left Twitter, the company they co-founded with Jack Dorsey. Expectations for both Obvious Corp. and Medium, a collaborative publishing tool and the first product it launched in August, have been high, although the product appears to be growing slowly.

Hansen wrote in his email to friends and family (reported by Mike Isaac of AllThingsD, formerly of Wired) that he would be working specifically on editorial content at Medium, which hired noted literary agent Kate Lee to direct content back in November.

At the moment, Medium is publishing blog posts from a wide variety of writers, technologists, and artists, clearly focusing on quality over quantity and slowly rolling out the ability to contribute. Published stories are divided into “collections” around certain themes, and aims to re-think how writers to publish to the web.

Last year at our Roadmap conference, Williams told attendees “I’d rather be HBO than whoever creates ‘Desperate Housewives,’” perhaps hinting at the type of content strategy that Medium intends to pursue.

This post and its headline were corrected at 4:28pm to after Hansen clarified on Twitter that he wasn’t leading all of editorial at Medium, just science and technology.

“It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong,” he said.

Today blogger Edward Champion of Reluctant Habits found that Lehrer had also recycled his own previous material for use in his bestselling book “Imagine.” Lehrer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said in a statement:

Lehrer fully acknowledges that ‘Imagine’ draws upon work he has published in shorter form during the past several years and is sorry that was not made clear. He owns the rights to the relevant articles, so no permission was needed. He will add language to the acknowledgments noting his prior work.

Lehrer’s editor at the New Yorker, Nicholas Thompson, told Jacob Silverman at the Daily Beast, “He understands he made a serious mistake. He understands the rules. It’s definitely not going to happen again.”

That’s bunk, according to Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who said in a recent interview that apps have proven “incredibly profitable” and touts the publication’s 165,000 tablet subscribers (65,000 of these are pure-digital subs). Mittman adds that Wired readers also spend a significant amount of time with the tablet version and that he “missed the memo” about the failure of apps.

So what’s going on? Is there something special about Wired, or have other publishers simply failed to execute correctly?

To understand, it’s useful to consider the key complaints set out by Technology Review’s Jason Pontin in his influential “Why Publishers Don’t like Apps” essay from early May, including:

• expensive developer costs
• difficulty quantifying subscribers
• an unnatural, walled garden reader experience.

Pontin also decried the vulturous 30 percent bite that Apple took from many sales, a figure that exceeded publishers’ own margins. He concluded that he would toss the apps and instead follow the Financial Times’ example by using HTML5 technology to provide an easy cross-platform reader experience. (The FT this week told pC2012 that it didn’t need a marketing boost from the iTunes Store.)

Wired’s Mittman, however, says that Pontin simply “chose one path that didn’t work out” and that “trail-blazing is not for everyone.” He believes that HTML5 will just be part of a “larger app experience” in which an app is a storefront or gateway for readers to have deeper interactions with publishing brands.

One upshot of this may be that publishers need to try harder to make apps work, but it’s also possible that unique factors make Wired an outlier. These include a techy readership combined with corporate and editorial support for a development team that has been building apps longer than most. Condé Nast, its deep-pocketed parent, may also be betting big in the hopes that Wired’s success can be replicated at its other publications.

Mittman’s bullish stance on apps may also be in keeping with Wired’s famous “Web is dead” cover of two years ago that described how browsers were being supplemented by other types of viewing platforms.

The proof will ultimately be in the revenue pudding, of course. Based on a $20-a-year subscription price, Wired is set to earn $1.3 million on its digital only subscribers (minus any Apple cut). This is hardly earth-shaking but, after just two years, it may be big enough to keep Condé Nast in the app game for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it seems likely other publishers will continue to join instead the “good enough revolution” (a Wired term, by the way) offered by HTML5.

BookTour.com was founded in late 2006 by Smokler, Anderson and CTO Adam Goldstein and went live in 2007. At the time, Anderson wrote on his blog, “There was just no good way to find out about [author] events–or, just as importantly, request one yourself–before. Now there is. We’ve got a good fraction of the current authors on tour and their existing events in our database already and we’ve adding dozens of new ones each day.” The site raised $350,000 from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) in 2009, and BookTour.com event data was included on Amazon Author pages.

Four years later, there is just as much demand from readers to meet their favorite authors–but, as noted in the blog post, author book tours are much less common and more funds are devoted to online marketing, including social media. In today’s post, Smokler noted some of the other tools that are available to promote author events: “In our absence, we recommend tools from Amazon Author Central, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Calendar, Upcoming.org and Eventful.com as worthy replacements.” None of those (with the exception of Amazon Author Central, of course) focus on books.

While we’re at it, a note on Kevin Smokler, who wrote this post on discoverability of books for paidContent in March: In addition to his work at BookTour.com, Smokler was also recently hired as VP of marketing at long-form journalism site Byliner, but he just got a book deal and has left the company to work on writing full-time. He’ll “still consult with them on a per-project basis, sit in on editorial meetings and generally shift to an at-large role within the larger company structure,” he wrote last week on his blog. “I’ll keep all my stock and extended relationships with the company.”

It will publish a Wired supplement inside this coming October’s local GQ magazine plus an iPad app, Conde’s German president Moritz von Laffert says (via Kress.de).

“It’s a way to gently introduce the brand and see how the acceptance is,” von Laffert said.

The supplement will include local material and some from the magazine’s other editions.

It could lead to a full-time monthly publishing schedule.

Wired UK had an average 50,044 readers per month in the second half of 2010, 50,044 of them via subscription.

Last week, Time Inc. unveiled its new “All Access” digital subscription plan for Sports Illustrated: one monthly or annual price for print delivery and complete use on their PC and-and for now-Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android-powered mobile devices. A few days before that, the company said that SI, Time magazine, Fortune and People will be available on the new HP (NYSE: HPQ) TouchPad when it comes out later in the year.

Condé Nast wouldn’t discuss its subscription packages for the Android system, but it surely has that goal in mind. It also wouldn’t mention what it plans to charge for individual issues, though a New Yorker iPad issue download costs $4.99, while Wired is $3.99.

Last fall, Next Issue Media, the joint venture involving Time Inc. and Condé Nast, as well as Hearst Corp. and Meredith Corp. (NYSE: MDP), said that it will set up its digital storefront for magazine subscriptions and individual sales on the Android’s platform this spring. The game plan is premised on the notion that once things take off as planned on Android, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) will be more willing to make concessions to the publishers. But that’s more a question of “if” rather than “when,” at this point.

Check out our bestseller lists to find out the daily most popular digital content, free and paid — from iTunes and YouTube to Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Kindle.

According to the WSJ, Google is currently shopping around the idea of a digital newsstand to publishers that include Time Inc. (NYSE: TWX), Condé Nast and Hearst Corp..

Google is trying to sweeten the deal with revenue sharing terms better than the standard 70-30 split offered by Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), although the article doesn’t say what Google’s split would be. It has also proposed sharing more information about readers, “to help with marketing related products or services.” The project is being led by Stephanie Tilenius, VP of e-commerce.

If this newsstand story is true, Google would be entering an already crowded market. In addition to Apple’s iTunes store selling magazines for the iPad, there are efforts from retailers Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) on their respective Kindle and Nook platforms; and the as-yet unlaunched newsstand from Next Issue Media, backed by Time, Condé Nast and Hearst, among others.

Coincidentally, Next Issue Media itself is planning to launch on the Android platform later this year; it’s not clear how this would sit in relation to a Google initiative.

But even if there are a number of offerings in play, there is still a lot of room for improving the formula.

One of the big problems with iPad apps, for example, is that publishers don’t have a lot of flexibility in how they can charge users for content: while some apps such as Newsweek‘s and the Economist‘s do offer subscriptions, the norm seems to be paying for single issues, which means users have to keep returning to the iTunes store to keep reading. The WSJ article notes that Apple is looking at improving this, too.

Difficulties in getting the charging right might be at least partly responsible for some of the disappointing figures we’re seeing for actual consumption of these digital magazines.

ABC (NYSE: DIS) figures show that Wired may have sold 100,000 copies of its iPad app in the first month, but between July and September, it averaged only 31,000 copies per month, and even fewer the two months after that, with 22,000 in October and 23,000 in November, compared to 130,000 print issues for each of those two months.

And Wired looks like the good news: Vanity Fair sold 10,500 copies per month in August-October, and 8,700 in November. Glamour started with 4,301 sales in September, but by November was only pulling in 2,775. GQ sold 11,000 digital copies in November but averages around 900,000 per month in print copies (that’s subscription and newsstand combined).

But Sauerberg, then the group president of consumer marketing, came off as the go-to guy for putting consumers, not advertisers, at the center of Condé Nast’s business. (David Carey, who left a few days later to run Hearst’s magazine unit, was at the same event but in the background.) As the company escalates its digital R&D efforts, it’s been up to Sauerberg to connect those dots to success in the short term — and to the long-term strategy of making more money directly from consumers who feel passionate about Conde’s niches and brands. The results from the first months of iPad apps show some of the efforts literally are paying off: through June, users paid for 182,000 downloads of Wired, GQ and Vanity Fair.

As Sauerberg stressed when we spoke soon after his promotion was made public, it’s still a very small business but it’s an example of what he has to accomplish as president of Condé Nast. Some excerpts from the interview:

– Conde DNA: Asked to explain concisely how Condé Nast was going to deliver on this strategy, Sauerberg replied: “Our DNA at Condé Nast is content in how we start the cultural conversation in everything we do. We are now going to get organized to develop our content and our brands in a way that starts with the foundation of the magazine but also extends into other platforms and in a way that develops a more balanced revenue stream for us.” He admitted ruefully, “That’s a mouthful.”

But how is Condé Nast going to get users to continue to pay more digital access than they do for print? How do they get past blow-card pricing? “You start with creating content experiences that people really value and you make it easy for them to consume and to buy. I think that’s the foundation of all of this.” The R&D process is a big part of that. “We’re trying to understand what it takes to move the needle with them. You don

The publisher has been experimenting with various approaches to digital magazines. This would appear to be a vote of confidence in the Wired model, which integrates digital development with the magazine staff’s print role. The first iPad edition sold more than 96,000 downloads at $4.99; the July issue hit the App Store Wednesday.

Update: Dadich told me by phone that effective immediately he’ll be working in his new role with Tom Wallace, editorial director, CN Publications, Rick Levine, VP-Editorial Operations, and others. First step: meet with all the magazine titles to begin talks about how “to establish the workflow and the creative processes that will allow us to make digital weditions of the magazines.”

Dadich will take the experience gained over the last year by creating a generic tablet edition and the specific iPad editions for Wired, using a publishing system based on Adobe Creative Suite. Most, if not all, of the other Conde Nast titles already use the suite. One of Dadich’s tasks will be help them figure out which aspects of the authoring tool work for them and what needs to be customized to each title. “It’s completely up to the magazines what that experience would be like,” he said. “Wired‘s acting as a lab, making mistakes, learning, having some successes … so that all 17 titles aren’t having the same learning curve.”

The first priority is working with The New Yorker for its planned fall launch of an iPad edition. At the same time, he expects working with the other titles to help him make the Wired experience better.