With Wired magazine well on its way to releasing a tablet edition, Condé Nast is now preparing four more digital magazines in a "research and development effort" that should last through October, according to a memo distributed to select internal parties on Monday.
The initiative expects to have an iPad version of GQ available with the April issue, according to the memo, portions of which were shared with Wired.com by a spokesperson. Vanity Fair is slated for June, with The New Yorker and Glamour following as quickly as possible. Of these, only GQ is already available in digital form, as an iPhone app. As previously disclosed Wired magazine's tablet edition will debut with its June issue (18.06).
While the iPhone has been available for nearly three years Condé Nast has more or less only dabbled on that platform — with the notable exception of GQ, which has sold a total of 22,000 iPhone copies of two issues at $3 each. Apart from that periodical, Condé has released branded apps which provide a portion of a magazine's experience — like Epicurious recipes and Wired product reviews — but nothing that attempts faithful reproductions of the magazines themselves.
In part this is because the revenue proposition — advertising and marketing opportunities, and a reader's willingness to pay something — is largely unknown and a big part of what Condé says it hopes to learn more about with its digital magazine initiative. But it is also because some believe that the "magazine experience" would have to be severely compromised for a screen as small as that on the typical smartphone.
Enter the as-yet-unavailable iPad, which has created an entirely new digital mindset — a "game changer," according to Wired magazine Editor in Chief Chris Anderson. And while company executives believe that Condé is further along than competitors with its tablet strategy publisher — and iPhone initiatives continue — the company is merely testing the waters by concentrating on five marquee properties: Condé Nast publishes 19 magazines and Condé Nast Digital runs 27 sites, including Wired.com (my employer), a separately-produced news service.
The company is also embracing a dual-track development process, driven at least in part by workflow and headcount realities. Wired magazine, for example, is leveraging its use of Adobe InDesign, used to produce the monthly print magazine, to create what it is careful to call a platform-agnostic tablet publication. Condé Nast Digital, on the other hand, is using technology and techniques developed in-house to create the digital versions of GQ, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Glamour.
"We have learned from Wired thus far that adjusting to the new workflows required for digital magazine production is extremely time consuming," the memo says. "Only by beginning now could a magazine hope to be ready for a fall launch, should our R&D program point us in that direction."
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