When Apple introduced the iPad earlier this year – and magazine publishers fell into a collective trance contemplating its awesomeness – Condé Nast announced its schedule of titles planning app rollouts for the device. The most anticipated – at least in the tech-y community — was Wired.
On Wednesday, the publisher unveiled the Wired reader app. The cost: $4.99 per issue.
“The irony that Wired, a magazine founded to chronicle the digital revolution, has traditionally come to you each month on the smooshed atoms of dead trees is not lost on us,” editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote in a letter introducing the app to readers. “Let’s just say the medium is not always the message.”
Anderson continued: “The tablet is our opportunity to make the Wired we always dreamed of. It has all the visual impact of paper, enhanced by interactive elements like video and animated infographics. We can offer you a history of Mars landings that lets you explore the red planet yourself. We can take you inside Trent Reznor’s recording studio and let you listen to snippets of his work in progress. And we can show you exactly how Pixar crafted each frame of its new movie, Toy Story 3.”
The digital version of Wired has been in development for about a year, according to Anderson, and will be available soon “for nearly all other tablets.”
“The arrival of the tablet represents a grand experiment in the future of media,” Anderson wrote. “Over the next few months, we’ll integrate social media and offer a variety of versions and ways to subscribe in digital form. We’ll learn through experimentation, and we will watch closely as our readers teach us how they want to use tablets.
"There is no finish line. Wired magazine will be digital from now on, designed from the start as a compelling interactive experience, in parallel with our print edition. Wired is finally, well, wired.”
More to read:
Vanity Fair’s iPad App Launch Overshadowed by Comcast
Look Who’s Jumping on the iPad Bandwagon
