A friend of mine has referred to me as a modern day P.T. Barnum for the way that I hype everything up. This is the Greatest Idea Ever! No, this is the Greatest Idea Ever! No wait, I really meant that this is the Greatest Idea Ever! Well, ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages, prepare yourselves for you are about to finally see what is really, truly, once and for all, the Greatest Idea Ever!!!!! I give to you, drum roll please…Next Issue – a new app for your iPad or Android powered tablet that delivers you unlimited access to most major magazines for a monthly subscription fee Netflix style!!! (http://www.nextissue.com/home-page-1/?utm_expid=45829366-5)
If you’ve been following my blog for a while then this probably sounds familiar to you for back in June I pitched a very similar idea (https://greatestideaever.wordpress.com/2012/06/30/54-netmagz/): “Just like with Netflix users would pay a monthly subscription fee, let’s say $5, and in turn they would receive the back issue of their choice in the mail. Once it’s returned, in good condition of course, they would receive the next issue. There could even be a digital collection of some less popular titles akin to the Netflix Instant Queue.”
While my article primarily focused on the idea of being able to access any back issue of any magazine via the postal service Next Issue has instead focused their business model on the Instant Queue. For a set fee, up to $15 per month, you can get unlimited access to any of the magazines that they have partnered with so far. That sounds impressive but could be misleading if the best of the 75 magazines is Country Living. But in the case of Next Issue it’s anything but misleading as they have assembled a collection featuring some of the most popular magazines out there from Entertainment Weekly to Sports Illustrated and everything in between! They even have some of my favorite titles like Wired and Fast Company! And they claim to be adding additional titles all the time! And there’s even a free 30 day trial! This just keeps getting better and better.
And the best part of all is that they even have back issues! In some cases like with Time Magazine this means that issues go all the way back to the beginning of the year. For others that were just added to the service like ESPN the Magazine this means that only a couple of issues are available. Luckily for me Sports Illustrated is one of the magazines that goes pretty far back so even though the college football season is almost over I will be going back and reading the Sports Illustrated college football preview issue!
As for the app itself it’s very easy to use and the issues download very quickly, faster in fact than when you download something through the iPad’s own newsstand. In addition, you can chose to have the newest issues of the magazines that you are reading get automatically downloaded to your queue as they come in. The only drawback to this service is that you can’t download more than one title at a time and the downloading process will use up a decent amount of your device’s battery power.
That’s a small price to pay however for having unlimited access to the current issue as well as several back issues of nearly every major magazine. Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and cancel all of my magazine subscriptions and get back to downloading all the back issues of Better Homes and Garden.