WIRED magazine now on the iPad

An application I’ve been wanting for quite some time now has finally appeared in the App Store—the digital version of WIRED magazine. The app had to be rebuilt due to the use of banned Adobe technologies, but it was worth the wait. As I’ve been a subscriber for a while, I found the content in the physical magazine to be pleasing to read and well laid out. Although I never really visit their website to read the content there, I’m still extremely excited to see it has made its way to the iPad.

There are a few reasons for this. For one, being a tech magazine, WIRED often informs readers to head to their site to see videos or other media. With the iPad app, this is all built right in to the application in a very intuitive way. Want to see more images or watch a video? Don’t worry, they come in the app itself. It allows me as a reader to get even more out of the content I consume, which is always a plus. Furthermore, having it in a digital format is also more green (it saves the trees used to print the magazine, as well as the gas used to ship them). Basically, I like everything about having WIRED on my iPad, and I feel it was done as magazine applications should be done.

I still do have some questions, though. First, I haven’t been able to find any information about how WIRED is planning on handling subscriptions through this app. The app itself cost $4.99 and comes with all 500MB+ of the latest WIRED edition (which is good because it doesn’t require Internet to read, but also bad because it takes up quite a bit of space). But does WIRED plan on simply charging for the new version as an in app purchase each time, will they release new apps each time, or will a subscription process be built in to the app? Hopefully we can find this all out when the next edition is released. I’d love to have a way to port over my subscription to the digital version of WIRED or even exchange them.

Product [Wired Magazine]