Recently, we visited the Hearst Tower (home of ELLE DECOR, House Beautiful and VERANDA) for a tour of the Hearst App Lab. The App Lab is in the process of taking all of Hearst’s magazine titles and creating digital versions, enhancing the content and adding interactive features that improve the experience.
Flipping through a magazine on an iPad is a surprisingly rewarding experience, especially when the magazine has embedded links, video, and more. The iOS5 platform offers a digital newsstand, presented as an app that aggregates media content. Hearst sells digital issues and subscriptions to its titles, which are purchased separately from its newsstand and magazine subscriptions.
The digital issues are optimized to work on every tablet available, and on our tour we got an overview of each tablet on the market and the pros/cons of each. Not surprisingly, the iPad outranks them all with 60 million iPads sold in less than two years, making it the most successful product launch to date.
Take a look at the video, shared with us by the App Lab team, which offers a more in-depth look at the work created in the Hearst App Lab and let us know, will you be tempted to abandon your monthly paper magazines in favor of the digital magazines?
A snapshot from the presentation we saw at the App Lab.
Every tablet on the market is represented in the lab, where they test each issue on every device.
