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Target, Zinio Create Co-branded Digital Magazine Storefront

Digital content provider Zinio has partnered with Target to offer digital magazines to Target shoppers.

Target.com customers can order digital subscriptions, single copies, and archived copies of magazines like Elle, Cosmopolitan, Maxim, Parenting Early Years, Popular Science, Woman’s Day, and a variety of others, at discounted prices, through what the companies are calling a co-branded, private-label newsstand site (target.zinio.com). The digital copies can be read on e-readers or portable devices like iPhones or laptops.

Target will market and promote its digital newsstand online and in stores nationwide. 

“Interest in buying and reading publications digitally is exploding. As the world’s leader in digital-publication content and commerce, we are thrilled to extend our portfolio to Target guests,” said Rich Maggiotto, president & CEO of Zinio.

Time Inc. is also planning a digital storefront for magazines. The publishing company’s John Squires is in the process of creating a joint venture, between Time Inc. and magazine publishers like Conde Nast and Hearst, whereby magazines are delivered via e-readers. The venture is expected to be announced next month, with a launch date of sometime in 2010.

Founding publishers will take equity stakes in the entity, and the venture will be financed by its partners. The magazines will live on a digital storefront where users purchase and manage e-mag subscriptions, available on any device. Publishers will set their own terms for dealing with the readers, which would increase their leverage with device makers like Amazon.

Currently, users can access periodicals via Amazon’s Kindle, but many publishers do not like the arrangement because Amazon claims as much as 70% of the revenue from those subscriptions, according to Reuters.

Magazine are moving forward with digital issues in the hopes of avoiding the mistakes of the music industry, which did not jump on the digital-business bandwagon until it was too late, thereby opening an opportunity for Apple to create iTunes, now the world’s largest seller of digital music.

Such ventures give magazine publishers a way to get their content in front of new readers and to charge for that content, something they have found challenging to do online.