ABORT Magazine™

Condé Nast Is Preparing iPad Versions of Some of Its Top Magazines

Thomas Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast, said a range of magazines would be tested.

(NYTimes) – The first magazines for which it will create iPad versions are Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour, the company plans to announce in an internal memorandum on Monday.

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 (the company has not yet determined the exact timing for those).

The company already sells an iPhone application for GQ. That has sold more than 15,000 copies of the January issue and almost 7,000 of the December issue.

Condé Nast plans to test different prices, types of advertising and approaches to digitizing the magazines for several months before wrapping up the experiment in the fall. “We need to know a little bit more about what kind of a product we can make, how consumers will respond to it, what the distribution system will be,” said Thomas J. Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast.

The magazines were chosen for their range, he said. “They are representative of the company, right? GQ is men. Glamour is women. Vanity Fair is a dual audience. The New Yorker is unique with its periodicity, and therefore it’s also more news- or text-heavy, and it’s a slightly older audience,” Mr. Wallace said. And Wired has already been working on a reader project with Adobe, the software company that provides publishing tools to much of the magazine industry.

Other than Wired, the digital magazines will be developed internally. “We’re taking a two-track approach partly because we want to learn everything that we can,” said Sarah Chubb, president of Condé Nast Digital.

READ MORE HERE

Copyright © 2004-2010 ABORT Magazine. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of this publication, in whole or in part, in any form or medium without express written permission from Abort Media Publishing Corporation (AMP Corp.) is prohibited. All use is subject to our Terms of Use.

Comments are closed.