The Wrap Reviews Print Apps for iPad

As predicted, more print magazines and newspapers are releasing iPad apps. How good are they?

Lew Harris, managing editor of The Wrap, has tested a batch of them, in a roundup review: Print Apps for iPad: What Works, What Doesn't. He says the results so far are "pretty encouraging."

Harris brings to the task the eyes and sensibility of a guy who's been a veteran of both print magazines (Los Angeles, People, Us) and Web-only publications (E! Online, Movies.com).

"The monthlies are doing a far better job of it than the dailies, for obvious reasons – they have the time to invest. And for the most part, they not only look damn good, but some are taking full advantage of the interactive possibilities.

Cleverly, most of the apps are free -- but downloading individual issues costs $3-5 (about the same as their newsstand price, but more expensive than a print subscription -- neither of which includes multimedia features such as video).

Harris walks us through all the tapping and swiping, and provides brief reviews of the top ten, which he ranks in order of best to least impressive:

* Men's Health
* Wired
* Vanity Fair
* GQ
* Popular Science
* Time Magazine
* USA Today
* New York Times
* Wall Street Journal
* The Nation

Which iPad apps have you downloaded and used? Please share your experience and thoughts in the comments section below, or on KobreGuide's Facebook Group discussion forum.

Only the Good Die Young

FLYP magazine (FLYPmedia.com) has been nominated for a prestigious Webby Award for its smart, resourceful pioneering of online multimedia, under the direction of former Time Inc. editor extraordinaire Jim Gaines.

The other four nominees are The Economist, National Geographic, the The New Yorker and Wired -- putting us in the company of titles with substantially more financial and journalistic resources, but not necessarily better ideas about how to tell stories on the web.

Alas, lacking those financial resources, after only two years, Flyp will publish no more. The investment capital has dried up, and until more is found, the revolutionary online mag will stand as a bold testament to what could and should be. (Editor Jim Gaines recently left to start his own interactive company.)

Flyp combines text, graphics, stills, animation, audio and video like no other online magazine, no doubt because it was created specifically for the Web and not just a Web adaptation of a previously existing print publication. Its navigation alone provides a different experience from merely flipping/clicking through pages.

So all at once we offer congrats, thanks, and hopeful wishes for a cavalry rescue and a speedy rebound.

Conde Nast Prepping Its Mags for iPad

Will print magazine readers, who can currently access most if not all of an issue's content for free on the Web, pay for a portable touchscreen multimedia version of each issue on Apple's soon-to-arrive iPad tablet?

Conde Nast has already experimented with GQ on the iPhone (pictured), where it sold 7,000 Dec. '09 issues and 15,000 Jan. '10 issues. These are not numbers likely to wow the beancounters, but it's a start.

Now the publisher is set to announce that it's planning to publish iPad versions of five of its top titles: GQ, Wired, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour.

According to the New York Times, "GQ will have a tablet version of its April issue ready. Vanity Fair and Wired will follow with their June issues, and The New Yorker and Glamour will have issues in the summer."

That's a good diversity of upscale material with which to test the waters -- a men's magazine, a women's magazine, a general interest magazine, and a techie magazine. Plus one that is weekly and notoriously text-heavy.

We salute the staffs for their pioneering spirit... and can't wait to see what they will do with multimedia and video.

Which titles will you download on iTunes?

Wired to Publish iPad Magazine

We're relieved to be in good company when we called the iPad a "game changer" for print journalism.

We've been among those forecasting that the addition of touchscreen visual journalism -- especially video -- is going to compel people to fork over a few bucks, either for each issue or for an extended subscription. That's partly because audiences are already in the habit of buying apps with the push of a button, even as they've lost their desire to purchase publications on newsstands and magazine racks.

As we've been predicting all along, iTunes will do for print what it did for music. Smart publishers will get on board early.

One such publisher that has vindicated our vision is Conde Nast, whose upscale titles include Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and GQ (which already publishes iPhone/iPod Touch app versions of its issues).

First out of the chute for iPad conversion is, appropriately, their premiere tech title, Wired. Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson announced at the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) conference on Friday that the publication would be releasing its content for the iPad by summer.

Anderson said the iPad allows periodicals for the first time to do digital content with all of the same values and artistic range that are the hallmark of print magazines. Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich worked with Jeremy Clark from Adobe (pictured) over the last six months to design the Wired iPad Magazine. [Ed. note: Couldn't they have displayed a more optimistic headline?]

Readers can sift through the contents horizontally and when they find an article they want to read, touch and drag their finger on the first page vertically to browse through the pages up and down. They can also turn the device horizontally to take advantage of the automatically-rotating display to view two pages side by side like a magazine and zoom out to see thumbnails of the content all at once.

Naturally, the best part, from our perspective, will be the inclusion of video. Touch a photo of a product being reviewed, and you'll get a video report about it -- a feature that will be especially enticing to advertisers.

And of course another big advantage over print is that the portable digital version can be offered for a fraction of the subscription price, which runs as high as $70/year for overseas addresses.

More info here.