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Some publishers have touted digital readership as a way forward for the magazine industry as advertisers warm up to iPad editions. The 58 magazine iPad editions tracked by the Publishers Information Bureau posted a 24.5% gain in ad units through June. Still, tablet circulation has not increased as rapidly as publishers had hoped.

Magazines apps are still too big for iPads because of all the images. Each iPad magazine takes up way too much storage, and people get turned off by the iPad magazines because of that. This is a problem specific to magazines because of all the imagery, especially for ads. Books don't have this problem, since they don't need ads. The situation reminds me of early tiny MP3 players before the iPod came out with its hard drive that could store your whole MP3 collection. Magazines on iPads will start to happen once you can store a hundred or thousand issues on them at once.

Presently, online versions of magazines lose "the coherence and majesty of the [printed] medium," said Anderson. Tablets, on the other hand, offer impressive functionality, such as 360-degree views and iPhone-like screen sliding, plus collapsing and layering -- all of which make the user experience vastly more compelling than the Web,

Also revolutionary from an editorial and design perspective is that magazine staffers -- now editing for print and the Web in separate work flows -- will be able to edit for print and tablets simultaneously.

tablet renderings of traditional magazines will draw consumers who weren't magazine readers before.

The growing body of overall information on tablet readership is reinforcing some early impressions that are promising for magazines on tablets, according to Conde Nast. Readers typically swipe through tablet editions from front to back, for example, the same way they work their way through print editions. They browse -- taking in ads as they go -- instead of jumping directly to specific articles the way web surfers do. "Consumer behavior with digital editions of magazines is very much like their behavior with print editions of magazines, and very much unlike their behavior with websites," Mr. McDonald said. Digital-edition readers are also still younger but more affluent than magazines' print readers, Conde Nast said, although the disparity has narrowed as tablet ownership has grown and Amazon and Barnes & Noble have introduced devices that are cheaper than the iPad. And ads with some level of interactivity -- a hotlink at a minimum -- continue to usually hold readers' attention longer than static ads.

A startup called Treesaver has developed a slick presentation framework for digital magazines that runs in the browser. It has many of the features you’d expect from a clean, reader-friendly content wrapper (like Instapaper or Readability) but it couples that functionality with a way-cool user interface.

But the more book publishers, more magazine publishers, more newspapers, the more video game creators, and textbook companies Apple can pull on board, the more attractive the iPad will become as a one-stop shop for media.

Lonny looks and acts like a print magazine, not a Web site or a blog. It has pages to turn, a table of contents and full-page ads. But it offers Web-only benefits like zoomable, clickable images, so readers can inspect a lamp displayed in a photograph of someone’s living room and then click to buy it.

Lonny is published every other month using Issuu, a Web platform where, for $19 a month, anyone can upload a PDF and instantly create an online magazine that looks like a print one.

“you’ll know a new narrative form has emerged when you have to consume a particular story on an iPad to truly understand its content, and reading it on any other platform simply wouldn’t work.”

Different genres of magazines are having decidedly different starts.

science and tech titles, for example, would probably have more fans among the first iPad owners than, say, a home decor magazine.

"The majority of advertisers who jumped on board in the beginning recognized this wasn't about scale," said Robin Steinberg, senior VP-director of publisher investment and activation at MediaVest USA. "2010 and possibly 2011 are mostly viewed as exploratory years. We are in a laboratory learning as we go. Short term, we are entering these types of initiatives to gain understanding and get exposed on a test-and-learn basis. The question is: Was it at the right price? And moving forward, should it be the same price? Doubtful."

Only a third of the Web sites reported making a profit.

More than half the magazines put their entire print editions online free. Four percent put all or almost all print content behind a paywall, and 10 percent put some of it behind a paywall. The rest post only some of their print output online, but all of it free.

About 49 percent of unprofitable Web sites gave away all of their content, and 65 percent of profitable Web sites did the same.

Time Inc.’s Fortune is keeping its name, but a redesign aims to reflect a time when many of its readers have less of the prosperity that the name suggests.

Fortune also is aiming for a more high-end feel, with a switch to heavier paper stock. The changes come as the magazine drops its frequency to 18 issues from 25 issues.

With the release of the iPad, companies with dedicate Apps Powered by PixelMags will be able to offer full-sized, digital versions of their publications, complete with interactive components like video and streaming media, at a fraction of the cost of the hard copy paper versions of their magazines and newspapers. The Apps will be compatible with the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Newspapers and magazines are reportedly in talks with Apple about repurposing their content onto a “new device,” presumably the rumored touchscreen tablet Apple will deliver in early 2010. Numerous reports suggest an Apple tablet would have a strong focus on redefining print media. Enabling in-app commerce through free apps was a crucial move to help make this goal a reality.

Issuu is the leading digital publishing platform delivering exceptional reading experiences of magazines, books, catalogs, reports, and more. In just a few seconds users can create beautiful digital editions simply by uploading their publications.

The iPad could give rise to a new creative self-publishing crowd that could, in turn, become competition for the established publishing industry.

A funny thing happened once the actual SDK was released to the broader development community: small houses and individual programmers delivered the first round of best selling games before the big companies got their products to market.

I suspect the first group to really embrace this will be educators who have created course material that includes audio and video, along with standard text. Authors of how-to books may also embrace video to enhance the learning process. Better yet, authors can take advantage of Apple's distribution power by making each book an app that can be sold through the iBookstore. By doing this, authors bypass publishers altogether.