The iOS Newsstand Is Open For Business

Folks who have upgraded to iOS 5 will note that the iOS Newsstand is now running and available as a standalone app. If you’ve already downloaded any of Apple’s official magazines – most Conde Nast titles are using Apple’s own service, for example – the magazines will now appear within the newsstand and the standalone apps will disappear from the desktop.

Non-newsstand magazines like the Economist remain as standalone apps although you willmay not be able to buy or subscribe to content through them. UPDATE – The folks at the Economist told me they are using Apple’s subscription service but have opted out of the Newsstand.

Apple announced this functionality last February with the launch of iOS 5. The move force content providers who wanted to sell content through their apps to give 30% of their revenue to Apple, leading to changes in almost every ebook and magazine app. Apps that use the subscribe feature must pay their cut while apps like Kindle and Nook have circumvented it by creating web-based purchasing systems and, in Amazon’s case, a web-based ereader.

As an emagazine convert, I love me some newsstand and I love being able to perform in-app purchases. However, I’d be more than willing to eschew them in order to get cheaper books and magazines. That said, the newsstand is clearly no walled garden as content producers can go either way and, more important, the experience is seamless to the end user.

That said, if you woke up today missing your fix of Wired’s rarely timely but always interesting tech news, now you know where your ecopy of the emagazine ewent.