The Beatles iPad app launching Thursday, digital replicas of Rolling Stone and US Weekly magazines in the works

9to5 Staff | Nov 29 2011 - 8:14 am PT

Wenner Media, best known for its music and politics biweekly Rolling Stone, will roll out digital replicas of both the Rolling Stone and US Weekly magazines for Apple’s iPad by early 2012. Digital versions of their dead tree counterparts will allegedly shy away from bells’n’whistles. In addition, the publisher will release the Beatles book app for iPad this coming Thursday, December 1.

A companion to the The Beatles: The Ultimate Album-by-Album Guide book that came out this summer, the app basically repurposes print content and sports much of the material from the Beatles’ book, MocoNews.net reports. This includes 122 pages with over 60 photos, enriched with 30-second previews of each song and interviews. The Beatles app will set you back ten bucks and will not initially launch on Android. And while we’re at the Beatles, it appears as part of the Apple Records settlement Yoko Ono got to copy Apple’s website look and feel.

Interestingly, it wasn’t that long ago that Jann Wenner, the co-founder of Wenner Media, dissed digital magazines as a fad. In a May AdAge interview, Wenner called out other publishers for scrambling to release tablet apps, painting the trend as “sheer insanity and insecurity and fear”. Perhaps the success of iOS 5 Newsstand prompted him to reconsider his stance? Last year, Wenner also organized a protest of sorts by running the magazine industry ad campaign that had promoted the “power of print”.

In a somewhat related app news, TED’s official app is finally available on the iPhone.