Excuse Me, Mr. Jobs, But Where’s The iMagRack?

With the imminent arrival of Apple’s iPad—initial orders deliver on April 3—the iHype has reached a fever pitch. Soon, anyone who feels the urge (and pays the price) can hold the magical, mystical tablet in his or her hot little hands and read a book, play a game or download tens of thousands of apps while helping Apple shift the paradigms of a few more major industries.

One of those is publishing. The iPad has been touted as a game-changer for print thanks in part to the iBookstore and the deals Apple has inked with five of the six major literary publishers, as well the company’s aggressive iBook pricing strategy, which has certainly gotten Amazon’s attention.

That’s all well and good. But wasn’t the iPad supposed to save the rest of the publishing world as well? Weren’t newspapers and magazines going to be reinvented as content-rich multimedia eyecandy that would encourage electronic subscriptions and swell readership ranks?

Maybe I missed it, but I have yet to see anyone from Apple demonstrating a magazine prototype on the iPad. Oh, I’ve seen tons of other mock-ups, but these have been speculatively created by publishers themselves—without much guidance from Apple—apparently as standalone apps.

Fine, but that begs another question: Once you get a publication properly coded and into the App Store, how can you possibly make it stand out among the 150,000 or so other apps desperately humping your leg for attention there? Would it not be logical to have a discrete, central location in the manner of the iBookstore just for periodicals?

Where’s my iNewsstand, Steve? Where’s the iMagstand?

What I’m hoping is simple: a magazine-centric, iTunes-esque digital storefront, a separate venue where readers starved for Us magazine’s latest Brangelina cover or the steamiest nerdporn from Wired could find it, all in one place, just a click away.

For me the main issue is that, without an iNewsRack to focus consumer attention on periodicals, without a specific iTunes sub-store to help drive readers to content, publishers will need to flog their titles as much or more than they already do or risk losing their precious little apps in the ever-expanding universe of the App Store. And in an era of cutbacks and budget restrictions, big bucks for app marketing may be difficult to justify.

Maybe Apple is just waiting to see what the Consortium comes up with. After all, Cupertino has a history of letting others map out new territories before swooping in and reimagining everything with far more elegance and a more refined user experience (see iPod). The same could be true here.

Or maybe they’ve just got their hands full trying to firm up the content for the iBookstore’s launch. Once that’s done, maybe, just maybe, they’ll refocus their clever programming mojo on magazines.

But Steve, please? When you get a moment, could you at least consider building my iMagRack? I really need to find out if OctoMom is pregnant again.

If you liked this, try:

1. Magazine Apps: A History (So Far)
2. Magazine ‘App’-titude

Tagged as: Apple, Convergence, devices, Launches, technology