iPad on Day One: Newspapers, Books, Magazines and TV

Apple has been working hard to make TV content, newspapers, books, and magazines available for the iPad. Here’s a handy list of what’ll be available on April 3 (plus some likely prospects) when you take your iPad out of the box.

Newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Associated Press, Financial Times.

Magazines expected to be available for iPad on April 3 include: Conde Nast’s Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Glamour; Time, Inc’s Time Magazine, Sports Illustrated and People; Hearst’s Esquire. Also: Men’s Health and SPIN. Announced on Friday: Popular Science+.

NPR, while it doesn’t have a paper equivalent for news, is said to be scrambling to prepare an iPad-specific site in time for the April 3 rollout.

If you’re into books, Apple’s current partners for the iBookstore include: Hachett Livre, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, The Penguin Group, Macmillan, Perseus Book Group and Workman Publishing. Random House has so far balked at a deal with Apple.

While it hasn’t been officially announced, it’s expected that the Kindle app may be available for the iPad, and that opens up all the books available to Amazon’s Kindle.

According to appadvice, Apple’s iBookstore will also include access to the Gutenberg Project. The Gutenberg Project is an online digital library of some 30,000 public domain books — all managed by volunteers.

Textbook partners include: McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, Pearson, and Kaplan.

For TV shows, there is, of course, the iTunes store where you can purchase TV shows for $1.99 (SD) and $2.99 (HD). Apple hasn’t been successful with its plan to get the TV studios to make some SD shows available for $0.99. Instead, the TV studios are rolling their own customer interface. (See below.)

As previously reported, there will be a Netflix app for the iPad. Netflix has it’s own financial arrangement with customers, and they most assuredly like it that way. Netflix has thousands of TV shows available in addition to its catalog of 12,000 movies.

TV Networks. ABC.com plans to offer iPad customers a special app that will allow them to view selected ABC TV shows, with commercial breaks, for free. CBS plans to stream selected TV shows via a the iPad’s Safari. CBS said that by April 3, they’ll have episodes of Survivor available as well as some promotional clips for other shows, like the Mentalist. That’s a modest initial effort, but the selection of shows may grow in time as the number of iPad customers grows into the multi-millions.

Like Netflix, the networks are holding the fort on creating their own relationship with the customer rather than succumbing to Apple’s overtures to make inexpensive TV shows for the iPad available via iTunes.

Hulu. According to the New York Times, a Hulu app is coming to the iPad, but no release date has been announced or even guessed at. Along with Netflix for the iPad, a Hulu app has generated a lot of excitement.

However, the article linked to above reveals that Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar has some tough problems to tackle. Namely, the content providers want Hulu to earn more advertising dollars and are lobbying for subscription fees. Don’t be surprised if the Hulu app for iPad requires a paid subscription.

Finally, as well all know, many publications that are on board with the iPad have been tuning their Websites to utilize HTML5 instead of Adobe’s Flash. On Thursday, Apple published a list of Websites that have done just that, invoking the open standards of HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.

While there are certainly many, many more publishers coming to the iPad in 2010, especially magazines and newspapers, this list is about all any mortal can absorb on the first day — and should keep us all very busy for weeks.