Google combined its Google Play Magazines and Flipboard rival Currents into one app on Wednesday called Newsstand.
The new app includes more than 1,900 free and paid publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist and Fast Company. In addition to displaying the titles in the style of an actual newsstand, the app also prioritizes content based on your tastes, as Mussie Shore, Product Manager for Google Play Newsstand, wrote in a blog post:
The more you read the better it will get. You can subscribe to magazines, newspapers, blogs and news sites and we’ll format and optimize them all for reading on your tablet or phone.
With the swipe of a finger, you can browse full length articles, with beautiful images, audio and video right inside the app. You can access these articles even when you’re offline or bookmark them to read later.
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The content in this case includes articles as well as subscriptions. Currents, a Flipboard-like newsreader app that Google introduced in 2011, had previously focused on the former. By giving readers a taste of some of the content, the thinking goes, they might be more interested in buying a subscription.
Though Apple and Amazon have been offering magazine and newspaper subscriptions for years, it is new for Google.
Image: Getty/Timothy A. Clary