Next Issue brings the Netflix of magazines to iPads

For all those magazine lovers out there, you get an all-you-can-read app for $10-$15

As a ravenous consumer of all things media, I am drawn to the all you can watch, read and listen services like Netflix, Hulu, Audible, Spotify, and now Next Issue Media. Back in April, Next Issue Media released a tablet app so that people could pay $10-$14 a month for all the "premiere" magazine titles from the likes of Conde Nast, Time Inc,. and Hearst that they can read. While, initially, this service has only been offered on Android tablets thus far, more than 40,000 people signed up and since April the company has amassed 12,000 active monthly users.

But now it is time for the next level of Next Issue -- going to the iPad. Next Issue already offers 39 titles with more promised to be added to the library later this year. Already in the catalog are Bon Appétit, Time, The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue and Wired.

The subscription levels are as follows:

• Unlimited Basic: Includes titles published monthly and bi-weekly, including back issues, for $9.99 per month.
• Unlimited Premium: Includes all titles in the catalog, including weeklies, and back issues. This includes titles such as Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, TIME for $14.99 per month.
• Individual magazine subscriptions range from $1.99 to $9.99 per month.
• Individual magazine issues are available from $2.49 to $5.99 per issue.

Thus far, Next Issue is really pioneering this type of magazine consumption while others are apps merely aggregate subscriptions you have already bought or cater to the ala cart purchases exclusively -- such as with Zinio or Apple's Newsstand.

Next Issue for iPad is available now in the United States with support for all iPad models and 30-day free trials are also available for all subscription plans.

While the service itself sounds amazing, Next Issue also helps keep your iPad free of a bunch of magazine apps and download because the app asks you how many issues you would prefer to be on the device at a given time. You can still download more or less and re-download older issues, but this helps you monitor space, if that is an issue on your iPad.

The app also allows readers to start browsing through a given issue before the download is complete -- so the down-time to reading is very limited. 

Since magazine-quality has been very closely matched by the interaction and resolution of an iPad, the magazine publishers should be seeing this app as an opportunity to regain and excite its reader-base that maybe has drifted away or been more inconsistent with their patronage. I know that I am going to be downloading the service for a month to see just how much I'll use it -- and I think it will be quite a lot.

Not to mention, I'll be able to avoid the embarrassing purge I have to do three times a year when I haul 30 pounds of magazines to the recycling bin.