Why The Magazine Industry Wants Its Own App Store. It’s All About The Data.

The magazine industry is falling over itself over a new shiny object. It wants to remake its product for a new class of digital tablets with color screens and touch screens. Today, a group of big publishers—Condé Nast, Time Inc., News Corp. Hearst, and Meredith—announced a joint venture to create standards for digital magazines to be read on tablets, e-readers, Web phones, and the like. The consortium will also create a digital newsstand to sell electronic copies of its magazines. These will be more like downloadable apps than Websites—think of it as an App Store for Magazines, where you can find and download magazine issues and subscriptions in app form. The existence of this App Store for Magazines (and newspapers, presumably) raises a big question. Why are these print publishers reinventing the digital wheel? A popular app store already exists. It's called iTunes. And people don't mind paying for apps there . By creating their own app store, the magazine publishers can avoid paying Apple its 30 percent cut of sales. But that's not the real reason. The real reason they want their own store is the customer data.