Apple’s Newsstand application, which allows iOS 5 users on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch to subscribe to and purchase magazines, has resulted in a surge of magazine subscriptions. According to paidContent, Condé Nast recently said its weekly subscription sales for nine of its digital magazines (Allure, Brides, Glamour, Self, GQ, Golf Digest, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired) increased 268% since the storefront made its debut alongside iOS 5. In addition, sales of single issues surged 142% in comparison to the eight weeks prior to Apple’s launch of Newsstand. “Putting all the magazines in one place just makes the most sense, in terms of allowing easy discovery for consumers,” Condé Nast executive vice president Monia Ray told paidContent. “Furthermore, the update from iOS 5 is terrific, especially the background loading. We have a lot of features embedded in our titles and they take time to load. Background loading helps ease the wait-factor. But for the most part, before, the App Store represented a wide-ranging bazaar. Now, it has clear aisles to make it simple for consumers to browse.”

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You no longer need an iPad to purchase and read some of your favorite magazines on a tablet. On Wednesday Next Issue Media — an independent media venture founded by Conde Nast, Hearst Corporation, Meredith, News Corp. and Time Inc. — released an early build of its new Android publishing platform. It’s home to popular titles such as Esquire, Popular Mechanics, Parents, New Yorker, Fortune, and Time. The applications for each magazine are only available on Samsung’s original Galaxy Tab on Verizon Wireless for now, and you’ll need to download them from Verizon’s own VCast application store, AllThingsD said. An issue of Esquire costs $4.99, although it can be purchased for $1.99 per month, too. Next Issue Media’s CEO, Morgan Guenther, said that publishers will receive “at least”  70% of each transaction, and that the company plans to offer at least 40 different magazine titles by the end of 2011. A webOS version is in the works, for HP’s upcoming TouchPad tablet, and we hope the firm has an Android 3.0 Honeycomb build in development, too.

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Barnes & Noble announced on Friday that it has updated NOOK for Android eReader application with access to newspapers and magazines. Users with 7-inch 800 x 480 resolution tablets running Android OS 2.1 and higher — that includes the Galaxy Tab, Galaxy Tab 10.1, XOOM, G-Slate, and others — can now view more than 120 magazines including popular periodicals such as Esquire, Maxim, Rolling Stone, and Popular Science, as well as national newspapers such as USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Tribune. Users can choose to access the content with a free 14-day trial, a subscription, or by purchasing issues individually. The update is free and should be available in the Android Market now. Hit the jump for the full release.

Barnes & Noble Updates NOOK™ for Android™ App, Gives Tablet Users Access to Largest Digital Periodical Offering on Android

More than 140 NOOK Newsstand™ Titles Including Interactive Magazines
with Exclusive ArticleView™ Now Available to Android Tablet Customers

Optimized Reading Experience for Most 7-Inch and Larger Tablets
Including Honeycomb

Free App Now Available in Android Market, V CAST Apps,
Samsung Apps, GetJar, and AppsLib

New York, New York – May 13, 2011 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the world’s largest bookseller, today announced an updated version of its popular, free NOOK for Android eReading application that brings the most comprehensive selection of digital periodicals to customers with Android™ tablets including more than 140 top magazine and newspaper brands from ESPN The Magazine and The Economist to Food & Wine and Us Weekly. To take advantage of large and extra large, high-resolution Android tablet screens, NOOK for Android now offers customers an optimized library grid view and reading experience with enhanced book margins and line spacing, aswell as an improved shopping experience and more. The new app features are available for popular 7-inch and larger tablets using Android OS 2.1 and higher (Honeycomb).

Today’s announcement marks the largest digital newsstand offering for Android tablet customers to date, with more than 140 of the best daily, weekly and monthlyperiodicals, all optimized for high-resolution displays in rich color. Barnes & Noble’s interactive NOOK Magazine™ experience, previouslyavailable only to NOOK Color™ Reader’s Tablet™ customers, is now available to the Android tablet community, featuring more than 120 popular titles such as Esquire, Maxim, Men’s Health, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, Popular Science, PC Magazine, Elle, O, The Oprah Magazine, Travel + Leisure and many more. NOOK for Android customers with large tablets can also enjoyfavorite NOOK Newspapers™ including USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. All can be enjoyed with a 14-day free trial, via subscription or purchased in single issue form.

With NOOK for Android on larger tablets, magazine reading is easy and engaging with full-color pages in landscape and portrait mode, and Barnes & Noble’s exclusive ArticleView technology (formerly available only on NOOK Color) which features only the article’s text, customized to the reader’s favorite style, on a central panel on the display. NOOK Magazines also feature a universal, easy-to-use reading experience with a slider to jump to the desired page, pinch and zoom to enlarge images and more.

“With our free, updated NOOK for Android application, we’re delivering customers with Android tablets a great optimized reading experience and access to the largest ever collection of interactive magazines, as well as top newspapers, all optimized for high-resolution displays,” said Jamie Iannone, President of Digital Products at Barnes & Noble. “Using their Android tablets, customers can enjoy our collection of more than two million digital books, as well as their morning paper and latest magazines,delivered right to their device through their NOOK for Android app, for an amazing periodical experience which includes our innovative ArticleView feature.”

NOOK Newsstand and the optimized book reading experience on NOOK for Android will be available for customers using 7-inch and larger Android OS 2.1 and higher (Honeycomb) tablets with 800 x 480 (160 DPI or less) or higher screen resolution, and include Samsung Galaxy Tab™, Motorola XOOM™, LGG-Slate™ and ARCHOS internet tablets, among others. NOOK for Android customers on smartphones will also enjoy minor performance enhancements.

NOOK for Android gives customers with Android smartphones and tablets access to Barnes & Noble’s expansive NOOK Bookstore™, one of the world’s largest digital content catalogs, with the most NOOK Books™ priced at $9.99 or less. As part of Barnes & Noble’s promise to “Read What You Love, Anywhere You Like™,” customers can enjoy NOOK Books from their Barnes & Noble digital library on their NOOK Color, NOOK eReader devices and mobile and computing devices using free NOOK eReading software or apps.

Expanded App Availability
To make it easy for Android smartphone and tablet customers to find and download the free NOOK for Android app, Barnes & Noble has expanded availability for the free app to include Android Market, V CAST Apps from Verizon Wireless, Samsung Apps, GetJar, and AppsLib, with more to come. NOOK for Android willalso be pre-loaded or made available in future firmware upgrades for some of the current leading and highly anticipated Android tablets coming to market. Customers can learn more about NOOK for Android v2.6.1 at www.bn.com/nookforandroid.

Just one day after Apple made its App Store subscription service available to publishers, Google has already responded by announcing a similar service for its Android platform. The solution will also work in Web-based clients, allowing publishers to reach users on multiple platforms with a single solution. Much like Apple’s implementation, Google’s One Pass provides users with a single interface where they can access and manage all of their digital newspaper, magazine and other content subscriptions. Unlike App Store subscriptions, however, Google gives publishers much more freedom with regard to pricing models and flexibility. Publishers will also be able to give free or reduced subscriptions to paid print subscribers, and they can even utilize a freemium model if they so desire. Hit the break for a video from Google outlining the One Pass product.

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Apple on Tuesday announced that its new App Store subscription model is available to all publishers. First introduced with News Corp’s The Daily, Apple’s new subscription model allows publishers to charge a recurring fee for content such as digital magazines and newspapers. The feature has been highly anticipated by publishers, who often claimed that the lack of a subscription model for publishers on the iPad was the main reason magazines and newspapers have not gained the traction many had hoped for. Subscription models now available to publishers include weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly and yearly subscriptions. On the user side, iOS device owners will be able to manage all of their App Store subscriptions from a single page. Hit the jump for Apple’s full press release.

Apple Launches Subscriptions on the App Store
CUPERTINO, California—February 15, 2011—Apple® today announced a new subscription service available to all publishers of content-based apps on the App Store℠, including magazines, newspapers, video, music, etc. This is the same innovative digital subscription billing service that Apple recently launched with News Corp.’s “The Daily” app.

Subscriptions purchased from within the App Store will be sold using the same App Store billing system that has been used to buy billions of apps and In-App Purchases. Publishers set the price and length of subscription (weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, bi-yearly or yearly). Then with one-click, customers pick the length of subscription and are automatically charged based on their chosen length of commitment (weekly, monthly, etc.). Customers can review and manage all of their subscriptions from their personal account page, including canceling the automatic renewal of a subscription. Apple processes all payments, keeping the same 30 percent share that it does today for other In-App Purchases.

“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app. We believe that this innovative subscription service will provide publishers with a brand new opportunity to expand digital access to their content onto the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone, delighting both new and existing subscribers.”

Publishers who use Apple’s subscription service in their app can also leverage other methods for acquiring digital subscribers outside of the app. For example, publishers can sell digital subscriptions on their web sites, or can choose to provide free access to existing subscribers. Since Apple is not involved in these transactions, there is no revenue sharing or exchange of customer information with Apple. Publishers must provide their own authentication process inside the app for subscribers that have signed up outside of the app. However, Apple does require that if a publisher chooses to sell a digital subscription separately outside of the app, that same subscription offer must be made available, at the same price or less, to customers who wish to subscribe from within the app. In addition, publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

Protecting customer privacy is a key feature of all App Store transactions. Customers purchasing a subscription through the App Store will be given the option of providing the publisher with their name, email address and zip code when they subscribe. The use of such information will be governed by the publisher’s privacy policy rather than Apple’s. Publishers may seek additional information from App Store customers provided those customers are given a clear choice, and are informed that any additional information will be handled under the publisher’s privacy policy rather than Apple’s.

The revolutionary App Store offers more than 350,000 apps to consumers in 90 countries, with more than 60,000 native iPad™ apps. Customers of the more than 160 million iOS devices around the world can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork, and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple is reinventing the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.

When Apple’s iPad was first introduced earlier this year, magazine publishers saw a great opportunity to combat declining subscriptions with a new distribution channel. The iOS-powered iPad would also allow publishers to get creative and introduce enhanced, interactive features that could not be achieved with traditional print. According to numbers available from the Audit Bureau of Circulations, however, magazine publishers’ hopes of having found a savior in the iPad are all but dashed. Every big name magazine title available on the iPad has seen its purchase rate decline since introduction, and most didn’t find much success to begin with.

Glamour, for example, sold only 4,301 copies in its debut month. Sales then dropped 20% in October and another 20% in November, landing at 2,775. GQ sold 11,000 copies in November, down from an average of 13,000 per month between May and October. Sales of Vanity Fair slid to 8,700 copies in November from an average of 10,500 from August through October. Men’s Health, which averaged sales of just 2,800 copies over the spring, sold 2,000 copies each month in September and October. Wired, which had a monster month when it debuted in June with over 100,000 downloads, dropped to an average of 31,000 between July and September and an average of 21,500 between October and November.

Many share the opinion that magazine publishers have failed to take full advantage of the iOS platform thus far, having simply transfered print versions of their magazines to the iPad with a minimal amount of bells and whistles. The tools to create content that is original, interactive and truly unique are clearly available, and the iPad may be the ideal vehicle with which to deliver this great new content — but the vision still appears to be seriously lacking.

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In an interview with Forbes on Thursday, HTC’s head of User Experience Drew Bamford provided some insight into where the company’s Sense product is headed in the near future. Sense started as a UI overlay placed atop various platforms on HTC devices. While the UI aspects of the product remain a central focus, HTC will continue to expand Sense in several areas off the device. The recently launched HTCSense.com portal is one example of Sense’s departure from phones, though it remains underutilized and confined to just two devices for the time being. Bramford says several services are on their way to Sense, however, including music and video content services as well as access to newspapers, magazines and eBooks. HTC already launched an eBook service in Europe that it plans to expand to other regions in 2011. HTC also plans to launch its own video chat service akin to Apple’s FaceTime, along with several services that focus on home entertainment. These and other services will be made possible by the continued transition to faster 4G cellular data networks. “At some point, you can imagine replacing your home Internet service with your 4G phone,” Bramford said. “I think we’re on the cusp of that transformation where mobile products and living room life collide.”

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Amazon has definitely had some issues keeping the wraps on its readers and it looks like the Kindle DX fell victim to the trend. Of course these most recent leaks weren’t quite as bad as the Kindle 2 we scooped over four months ahead of its official launch, but never the less we basically knew all there was to know about Amazon’s super-sized e-book reader ahead of today’s announcement. Well actually, there were a few surprises tucked away in Amazon’s pocket — namely automatic screen rotation which is certainly a welcome addition. The rest, such as its specs, annotation capabilities, device size and its new education-centric features were already pretty well covered. Pre-ordering is now live and the DX ships this Summer — Price of admission: $489.

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Amazon will be hosting yet another press event, this one slated for Wednesday May 6th at 10:30AM ET. In the recent past of course, Amazon press events mean one thing — a Kindle announcement. Ironically, this latest event will be held at Pace University, the historical location of the the New York Times 19th century headquarters and the same company rumored to be working with Amazon on a “big-screen” Kindle designed for newspapers and magazines. We place this rumor in the “highly likely to happen” category and look forward to unveiling Amazon’s latest Kindle offering.

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