Magazines on iPad: The New York Times on Newsweek, Wired, and More

In "A Race Between Digital and Print Magazines" The New York Times gets right to the heart of the issue involving long download times for magazines: publishers want to replicate every jot and tittle of the print edition rather than repurposing the content for iPad. Download times are excruciating. It's hard to understand how hard it is for publishers to move to the new model: content is the key, and it's presented in various ways depending on the medium. On the web, we dealt with this years ago in the separation between the content model -- XML -- and presentation. For websites in particular, content now lives in databases and content management systems present it in various ways. But apparently it's a holy grail to have the same presentation everywhere (in practical terms, that seems to mean taking press-ready PDF files and downloading them). 

Addressing the download issue is leading to some innovative thinking as the article notes

"Our data shows that tablet owners already spend more time using the browser than they do using apps," explained Ms. [Sarah] Rotman Epps [an analyst at Forrester Research]. "Some publishers will start experimenting with using the apps in a browsers, which don’t require downloading, in the coming year."

Apps in browsers? Or is this a thinly-veiled reference to Dashcode? Or both?

iPad is a different medium.

In a related article, The Times reports on Newsweek's new subscription model for iPad.