Featured App: Google Play Magazines
Filed under: Android, featured app, Google Play, magazines
Magazine Heaven is now on Google Play if you are a big fan of the format.
Now your favorite mags are brought to digital life on Google Play so you can hoard them, read back issues and do this online and on your Android devices. Just to be clear, it’s not really an app, but a content feature of an app.
There are hundreds of bestselling titles to choose from, but I couldn’t find much to interest me other than a few good foodie mags, oh and Entrepreneur Startups looked good.
Here are the options for purchase. You either pick a single issue for around $1.99-$5.99 or subscribe by the month or year (no real savings) and it will be delivered right to your tablet or phone.
A nifty featre is the ability to archive back issues to the cloud on Google Play so they are always available anywhere, anytime. I figure that the way magazines get handled in the real world, you are more likely to collect a bunch of issues and have them last in a digital format. The obvious missing feature is search. For a search company, you’d think they would have found a way to make these magazines searchable.
I’ve had a play and didn’t really think it was that great, but I can see this a great solution for avid magazine subscribers and collectors who want an option to read on the go on their mobile devices. You can also view online through the play online reader. The store offers hundreds of titles from many major publishers, including Hearst, Condé Nast, Meredith, Bonnier, and others. Apparently Google estimates that around 10% of the magazines they sell in the Play Store right now offer some kind of interactivity, please do tell if you experienced anything interesting with interactivity.
Read all about it here: play.google.com/about/magazines/
Certain companies have been offering this for years – Zinio for example – however these services have generally have little to no local (Australian) content…
Services such as Zinio are fine where local content is not a concern – many computer magazines are a perfect example – but are largely useless if you’re keen to catch-up on local news and/or stories.
At the time of writing I don’t own a tablet, but a service like Google Play Magazines – which is far more widely available than something like Zinio – is the perfect thing to convince me to buy one…
I’ve spoken to a few magazines on Twitter and Google+ regarding Google Play Magazines and most have given a similar answer – that they’re just working out the last few legal kinks and hope to have their content available “in the near future”.
Most of the magazines I’d read – Zoo Weekly; computer, telecommunications, car and gaming magazines – would rarely require me to search for content (if ever), as most of them I’d read once and that was that…
My wife however, likes her food magazines – which often have recipes – and this is exactly the sort of thing for which a “search” function is needed!
Google Play Magazines is a brilliant step in to the right direction – that is to bring digital publishing to the mainstream – but it still needs a little tweaking…