Revival of the Fittest: iPad Breathes New Life into Popular Magazines

Most print publications have been bleeding red ink for a long time. Some of them have thrown in the towel and gone out of business.

But now the iPad is breathing new life into print publications, especially magazines. As usual, it appears that Apple is once again re-shaping the way we consume and interact with information.

Apple just reported that it has sold 3 million iPads, even though the device only hit the market in early April. Last month, the iPad was introduced in Europe and Asia, so expect that number to jump to, well, maybe around a gazillion.

But the iPad is not just another product win for the reinvented Apple, which expects another blockbuster in the iPhone 4 that went on sale today. iPad is also reinventing magazines.

Magazine publisher Condé Nast just announced that it was bringing back its popular Gourmet magazine, which it closed down in print form last October, as a new life form – an application that will run on the iPad and other mobile devices. According to Advertising Age, the new application will be a combination of stories that once ran in the magazine and “a social experience that will involve earning points, spending virtual currency and sharing recipes.” The application will be free and supported by advertising, although the publisher doesn’t rule out experimenting with paid content.

The New York Times reports that the new Gourmet application will “allow users to share articles to social sites like Facebook and Twitter, tag articles as favorites and see which articles are more popular among their friends.” It will also “incorporate a real-time game engine, not unlike the model popularized by the mobile application Foursquare…”

Meanwhile, WIRED magazine, another Condé Nast property, which has always used the Internet to its advantage, recently launched an iPad application priced at $4.99. In the first nine days of its availability, the application was downloaded nearly 73,000 times, according to Crain’s New York Business. That’s as many copies as the magazine sells on the newsstand. The magazine’s editor, Chris Anderson, says WIRED worked up four test editions for the iPad before it went live with the application in June.

Other magazines are seeing promising results with the iPad. POPULAR SCIENCE, for example, launched with the iPad’s introduction in April and has sold in excess of 34,000 copies.

The real story here is not the expected success of the iPad, but rather the fact that the device represents the revival of the fittest. Magazines that once ruled the media world as print editions are forging an early lead in producing digital editions that take advantage of the iPad environment.

This is a development that is too important to overlook. It could represent the eventual rebirth of the magazine business (and maybe newspapers, too), and give consumers a whole new way to read and interact with them.