By Staff Writer – John Federico (@gadgetboy)

Last week I wrote about Maggwire, the startup company that has ambitious plans to create the iTunes for Magazines. According to The New York Observer, it appears some major publishers may have beaten them to it.


John Koblin reports that Hearst, Time, Inc. and Condé Nast have banded together to form a joint venture that will deliver content from possibly more than 50 magazines including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and O, The Oprah Magazine.

But what are the plans for distribution and consumption? We’ve already seen that laptops aren’t suitable for consuming this type of rich, colorful content on the go and there’s no device on the market that can currently deliver a rich experience.

Koblin tells us that content will be formatted for use on the iPhone, BlackBerry and other digital devices (read: Apple Tablet?). The company will create a shopping experience that people are already familiar with (read: iTunes) – “a store where you can buy new and distinct iterations of The New Yorker or Time. Print magazines will also be for sale.”

John Squires, Executive Vice President and Digital Futurist for Time, Inc., is rumored to become the interim Chief Executive of the joint venture with a tenure of six months. At which time, a permanent CEO will be installed.

If you thought Maggwire’s plans were ambitious, this one tops them by several orders of magnitude.

First, there’s the collaboration component. Getting the three behemoths to rally around a single concept and business model will be a nightmare. Fear may be the only motivating power than forces cooperation.

That said, the bigger challenge will be surrounding format and distribution. Producing content for multiple digital devices is a difficult task, at best. Trying to mimic the experience of reading rich magazine content on an iPhone, BlackBerry and the legendary iTablet will be an almost near impossibility.

In the end, consumer and advertiser adoption will drive everything, so the Big Concept they must embrace is FAST ADAPTATION. Given that they’ve been clinging to their old business models since the dawn of the commercial internet, I don’t hold out much hope. (Though I do wish them luck. I want to see them succeed and make the transition to digital with minimal loss of money, people and creativity.)

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

Tags: Apple iPhone , Apple tablet , BlackBerry , Condé Nast , Digital Media , Hearst Corporation , iTunes for Magazines , Magazine Publishing , magazines , Sports Illustrated , The New Yorker , Time Inc