Newsstand: What It Means For Tablet Publishing

We’ll be spending the next few days at WWDC working through what Newsstand means for our clients and for the publishing community (and will provide as much info as we are allowed).

If, like us, you were frantically following live blogs, tweets, or random auto-refreshed Web pages covering the Apple WWDC Keynote Address on Monday – you may have missed one of the rapidly demonstrated ‘pillars’ (or was it a ‘tentpole’?) from Scott Forstall’s iOS5 preview presentation. However, for many of clients and for Newspaper and Magazine industry in particular, this may be the most important announcement of the week.

It’s called Newsstand. And it means Apple is rapidly changing the way digital periodicals will be discovered/read/and updated across the iPad and the iPhone.

We’ve spent most of the day deciphering what little information is available from our team on the ground in San Francisco and various online sources to help define what Newsstand is – and perhaps more importantly – what it means for the industry.

First – what we know from yesterday’s Keynote Address. Newsstand will be the name of a new App (native to iOS5) that will automatically and seamlessly aggregate a user’s downloaded suite of newspaper and magazine apps (and specifically those that have been chosen for recurring subscription) to an iBooks-style ‘bookcase’ interface, enabling a fast and organised view of the latest news/issues/editions as they become available.

In essence, it’s a ‘smart’ folder that will provide users a focused and clear interface to newspaper and magazine content – away from the noise and clutter of the typical iOS desktop.

Crucially, with all periodical apps conveniently located in one place, breaking news, latest issues and content updates can be collated together (and automatically downloaded), allowing for a fast/handsfree update process within the folder itself – keeping readers both organised and up to date across all their daily ‘reading’ apps without the need for multiple clicks, checks, approvals, and page swipes.

From a reader’s perspective, the facility for a well-designed, automatically updated, and fully aggregated periodical app will no doubt be a welcome addition. For content providers, the ‘killer app’ in this killer app may be the secret compartment that lies behind the bookcase – the “Newsstand Store”.

For years now it seems, the hunt for news and magazine apps has been fraught with keyword confusion, category changes, and of course, the drive for Featured status – the only tools available to the digital periodical publisher to help ‘stand out’ in the App Store and to rise above the growing tide of Games, Soundboard Apps, and single issue eBooks.

With the introduction of a fully customised section of the Apple App Store dedicated to newspapers and magazine, this confusion is set to improve dramatically. This is great news for both readers as well as publishers, and signals a clear intent by Apple to bring periodicals to the forefront of their content offering.

This is clearly an exciting time for newspaper and magazine industry as there is finally an “app for that”!