Attention terrified editors looking for ways to sell your newspapers, magazines and pamphlets in the digital age: stop reading and download the December 2009 GQ issue app immediately.
The GQ Men Of The Year Issue app has digital delivery down to a science. This isn’t simply a magazine scanned into an iPhone app. This is GQ in digital form. The table of contents on the front end of the app allows you to quickly go to any section of the magazine you want to read, and each article has an attached media gallery with any photos or videos that are associated with the story.
The text of the magazine is very easy to read, and the landscape vs. portrait master-debaters can all rest easy, because the GQ issue app reads well in either orientation. While the portrait view basically makes the articles iPhone-viewable by removing most of the cute formatting tics of the magazine proper, the landscape view lets you page through the magazine as if it were resting in your fingers.
The videos and pictures all display at a very nice resolution, as I can gladly attest after viewing the media associated with the profile on “Gossip Girl’s” Leighton Meester. The accompanying video lets you inside the photo shoot Ms. Meester did for GQ. This might have been worth the $2.99 price alone.
With the newsstand price of an issue of GQ going for $4.50, this app represents a $1.50 savings. If they somehow opened up a subscription, I imagine the $3 app price would decrease further, making the idea of digital delivery of newsstand items a profitable idea for readers and publishers alike.
