Apple looks for ways to make electronic magazines even more appealing in Apple News+ — Apple World Today

The tech giant says that, unlike other electronically reviewable media services such as Netflix, electronic magazine services can be challenging to implement with features that are desirable for a variety of uses. For example, specific magazine articles lack comparable third-party reviews that might lead a potential reader to consider reviewing the article and/or the magazine issue in which it is published.

Also, the text-based form of articles published in magazine issues can be limiting from an interactive perspective. Apple says that, with so many different articles available to the potential reader and with the substance of each article somewhat buried inside each of these different articles, the electronic-magazine service provider has a problem directing and maintaining the reader’s interest.

What’s more, Apple says it can be challenging for electronic-magazine service providers to generate and provide access to each magazine issue in a timely manner. Consider, for example, an electronic-magazine service provider needing both to draw attention to an upcoming magazine issue while also needing to pull together and properly format article metadata necessary to permit electronic access on behalf of many potential readers. Apple says that these and other issues have presented challenges to content access for generating interest in electronic magazine articles/issues, and the tech giant wants to overcome such hurdles.

Here’s the summary of the invention: “As may be implemented in accordance with one or more embodiments herein, content in each of a plurality of electronic magazine issues is communicated as follows. One of the plurality of electronic magazine issues is identified for communication with a magazine reader, such as a user reading magazine issues on an end device (e.g., tablet or other computer). 

“At a user display device, and via a user-communication interface medium, an issue cover having an issue name and a cover image is caused to be displayed for the identified magazine issue, as is a summary or overview of articles for the identified magazine issue. For the latter, the display of the issue cover is autonomously caused to be replaced by a set of successive screen pages respectively corresponding to the articles, with each of the successive screen pages including a feature image and article-characterization text associated with one of the articles.”