Amazon to help kick off the launch of the Kindle Fire is offering unusually long, three-month free trial subscriptions through its Kindle Fire Newsstand. Those who get the Android tablet will have temporary free access to 17 magazines from Condé Nast, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Wired and Glamour. The option extends through to anyone who buys a Kindle Fire by March 1.
Amazon officially if partially entered the tablet arena on Wednesday by launching the Kindle Fire. The seven-inch tablet uses a heavily customized version of Android 2.1 and is a showcase for Amazon Prime, Amazon MP3, Cloud Player, and now much more optimized magazines on the Kindle bookstore with a newsstand for titles from Condé Nast, Hearst, and Meredith. The $79 Prime subscription gets the usual free two-day shipping as well as unlimited access to Amazon Internet video; a 30-day trial comes with the sale.
True to a late leak, five major American publishers today cemented plans for a joint venture to promote a universal standard for digital magazines and similar content. Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp and Time expect the unnamed company to develop digital magazines that will be readable on many platforms, including different operating systems and screen sizes, such as computers, smartphones and tablets. The technology will also be designed such that it should scale up to color reading devices with mixed media like animations and video.
Hearst today provided details of a new digital publishing system it hopes will make digital text more widespread. Skiff will have a store as well as an underlying gateway that lets Hearst and other firms both collect ad revenue from all their sources as well as adapt the same book, magazine or newspaper to a variety of formats. A single work could be reformatted to work with an iPhone, dedicated e-book readers or even tablet devices.
Time Inc. is planning on releasing an e-book reader in order to compete with Amazon's Kindle and other similar devices, according to a leaked internal document from the publisher. A recent NBC report says the magazine publisher will show the device before the end of the year. Time has previously gone on record to say it will not bring out its own e-reader, but has apparently since changed its mind.
