By MG Siegler
This past May, a month after the iPad’s launch, I wrote about my changing media consumption habits due to the device. Surprisingly, I had started reading print media again after several years away. Well, reading it in digital format on the iPad. That said, I noted that there were still some big problems with the pricing that would likely stop most consumers from doing the same. Apple (AAPL) now appears to be on the verge of fixing that — maybe.
A few reports over the past several days have noted that Apple is in talks with magazine and newspaper companies about creating a new store — a digital newsstand, as it were — similar to the store Apple created to sell books on their devices. Through this store, Apple would sell print publications by way of subscription (and, presumably, stand-alone issues also). The latest report today in the Wall Street Journal suggests such a store could launch as soon as October or November — or possibly early next year alongside a new version of the iPad itself.
From these initial reports, it sounds as if this store could be just the thing Apple and these print publications need. Currently, the magazine/newspaper situation on the iPad is a mess because each of them is an individual app. It was actually worse at launch because each individual issue of each individual publication was a separate app — most have since switched to one app for their brand with in-app purchases being used to buy new issues in that app. The launch of iOS 4.2 in November will also clean things up a bit since you will be able to stick all your magazines/newspapers in a folder to better organize them.
But a centralized repository of this content is a
