Apple iPad: Details leak about magazines and comic applications

 

Apple blogs are reporting details about magazines and comics for the iPad, as well as the availability of *koff* *koff* explicit content.

Magazine publishers are using the iPad's features and sexiness as a tool to flog ad sales, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Time, for example, has signed up Unilever, Toyota Motor, Fidelity Investments and at least three others for marketing agreements priced about $200,000 each for a single spot in each of the first eight issues of the magazine's iPad edition. Sports Illustrated and Condé Nast's Wired are also getting in on the fun.

The Journal says:

Magazines largely are planning downloadable iPad applications that are near-replicas of the stories in the print versions, but they are demonstrating the new-media bells and whistles for advertisers: add-ons like videos, social-networking tools and navigation that take advantage of the large screen, touch technology and Internet connections of the tablet computer.

Time Inc.'s Sport Illustrated has been showing advertisers three video-heavy ad prototypes, including one for a Ford Mustang that includes an arcade-style driving game using the tilt-and-turn capability of the iPad. With a few touches to the screen, readers can pick paint colors and wheel styles for cars they might want to buy.

Publishers hope the iPad will inject new life into the moribund advertising industry, combining the look and size of a full-page magazine ad with digital's interactivity and ability to measure the number of people who've interacted with the ad.

But blogger and journalist Scott Rosenberg says the optimism is premature. Rosenberg, who co-founded Salon Magazine and therefore knows something about online journalism, says the hype over the iPad reminds him of CD-ROM fever in 1994. Back then, publishers were convinced that CD-ROMS would open up vast new markets for multimedia content. Rosenberg doesn't see any more demand for that kind of content in 2010 than there was in 1994.

I can’t wait to play around with this. But I don’t see myself rushing to pay for repurposed paper magazines and newspapers sprinkled with a few audio-visual doodads. That didn’t fly with CD-ROMs and it won’t fly on the iPad.

Magazines won't be the only periodicals on the iPad. How about comics? The comic book reader Comic Zeal is getting an update to an iPad-compatible version, according to the blog Boing Boing. The picture above is a screenshot of the app -- doesn't it look great?

Also, for those who prefer their reading more spicy: Apple seems to be gearing up to sell explicit content on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch, according to Apple Insider, which also provides screenshots. (Screenshots of the proposed iTunes Store changes, not the porn, so don't be so quick to click the links, you darn pree-verts.) Until now, even mildly titillating content on the iPad has been blocked by Apple, although the filters are applied unevenly -- for example, Playboy is allowed in the store, though other publishers, with about the same level of explicitness or less, are blocked.

Apple Insider says:

Links to new "explicit software" categories in iTunes indicate that Apple plans to finally deliver adult content for both the iPad and for existing iPhone OS devices, segregated from other content with parental controls in the same way that iTunes has long sold music with explicit lyrics.