... BUSINESS Legal
Topics Books World
Urban Forum On
Corruption African
City Profiles By Kenneth Li
in New York and Joseph Menn in
San Francisco Time Inc is
leading an industry-wide joint
venture to create a digital store
for magazines as a way for
publishers to avoid surrendering
their digital future to the likes
of Amazon.com or
Apple. The new
service, as yet unnamed, would
serve as a digital storefront for
magazines, possibly newspapers
and other publications and is
expected to be announced in about
a month. The launch is planned
for 2010, people familiar with
the plan said. Time, a
division of Time Warner, has held
talks with Condé Nast and
Hearst about the venture. Time
and Condé Nast declined to
comment, and Hearst was not
immediately reachable. The business
would be structured like Hulu, a
popular online video service
formed by NBC Universal, News
Corp and Disney. Founding
publishers are expected to take
equity stakes in the new entity
and the venture will be financed
by its partners. Details of the
arrangement have not been
finalised, these people
said. Publishers
fear repeating the mistakes of
the music industry, which delayed
exploiting digital businesses
until Apple created iTunes, now
the world's largest seller of
digital music. The creation
of the store comes on the heels
of a devastating advertising
decline for newspapers and
magazines as consumers migrate to
the web, where material is
available free of charge.
Amazon.com's Kindle e-reader
device and service has also
emerged as the frontrunner in
digital book sales, creating
unease among
publishers. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8de6b040-af79-11de-ba1c-00144feabdc0.html
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Magazine
publishers plan digital
store
