Virtual Pants

I can’t sum it up better than Matthew Guay at Techinch:

But here’s the thing: magazines aren’t a new idea, just like newspapers aren’t a new idea. Neither are blogs; they’ve been online for well over a decade now. Clean, single column designs with light backgrounds and sans serif fonts aren’t unique either; they’ve been used in print in the past, are terribly popular on writing-focused blogs today, and are now being used in new iOS magazines, including The Magazine, upcoming magazines from TypeEngine, and undoubtedly many others. Even if we all blogged with the very same theme, it wouldn’t mean we were all copying each other; after all, almost every newspaper worldwide looks very, very similar at first glance.

What must - and will - be unique is the content. TypeEngine is setting out to do for iOS publishing what WordPress did for web publishing. WordPress democratized publishing, making blogging accessible to anyone, no matter what their coding skills. You can fuss over it all you want, but it’s a powerful piece of software that now powers sites from the smallest startup blog to Time Magazine’s blogs. But that didn’t take away anything from the early hand-coded blogs, and original bloggers such as Dave Winer have kept on blogging, even though the rest of us now can so easily star our own sites with WordPress or other blog engines without digging deep into code.

The Magazine’s innovation was the idea of publishing long-form blog content in iOS’s Newsstand. That’s it. It was a great idea, and seems to be paying off. Like any great idea, others are going to replicate it. TypeEngine is just making it easier.