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Glenn Fleishman On Newsstand For Publishers

Glenn Fleishman, writing for TidBITS:

Put bluntly, Newsstand is a ghetto. Readers complain to me regularly about forgetting to read The Magazine, even though we use iOS notifications for each issue. If readers don’t read immediately and don’t remember to tap the Newsstand icon later, they forget about us entirely.

His article comes in response to Marko Karppinen, who writes:

The segregation of Newsstand apps into the Newsstand folder wasn’t ever a positive aspect of Newsstand, but we were optimistic and thought that perhaps readers would form new habits around it. As an industry, we decided to give it a go. Apart from some early successes, attributable to a first-mover advantage, that was a mistake.

As users, many of us complained about the old Newsstand’s folder nature and the inability to hide the app, but publishers aren’t so happy now that it’s possible with iOS 7. I’m curious to see if more publishers will chime in on this.