The second big iOS 5 enhancement announced at the 2011 WWDC was none other than Newsstand — a method to directly access magazines and newspaper content from your iPhone.
So all of your favorite magazines — Elle, GQ, Esquire, etc. are available for immediate download and will reside in a folder that looks like, well, a newsstand on your iPhone’s Home screen.
Subscriptions will play a role in newsstand to seamlessly deliver your content right to the comforts of your iPhone.
New issues of all of your favorite reading material will be downloaded in the background and available for reading later, even offline…
Read all about it. All in one place. iOS 5 organizes your magazine and newspaper app subscriptions in Newsstand: a folder that lets you access your favorite publications quickly and easily. There’s also a new place on the App Store just for newspaper and magazine subscriptions. And you can get to it straight from Newsstand. New purchases go directly to your Newsstand folder. Then, as new issues become available, Newsstand automatically updates them in the background — complete with the latest covers. It’s kind of like having the paper delivered to your front door. Only better.
Newsstand looks like the periodical version of iBooks; Apple’s goal here is to obviously encroach on a market currently dominated by Amazon’s Kindle.
If the success of the iBooks Store is any indication of what to expect, then I’d be looking over my shoulder even more so if I was Amazon.
What do you think? Does Newsstand look like something that you would use?
We’ll have more details surrounding Newsstand in the near future, stay tuned for even more coverage of WWDC 2011.