(2011-09-30) Offline Tablet Magazine Options

The Wife is considering buying some sort of Tablet. Her primary UseCase is reading magazines on airplanes (she spends lots of time on international flights). I'm going to assume that WiFi isn't available/free/simple.

The experience has to be pretty much automated - in other words once she picks a magazine it needs to auto-update without her having to remember to run a magazine-specific app before she starts her trip. (It's ok that she needs to turn the device on to let a global update happen.)

Options to consider

• IPad with magazine apps
• Kindle (esp new Kindle Fire?)
• Nook
• Android Tablet with what? Are the mags supporting apps there?

Secondary use-cases

• She seems EBook-hostile at the moment, but maybe that would change. (Actually, I think she just doesn't like paperbacks because they get messed up too easily, so maybe that's a pro-EBook direction...)
• she doesn't travel with a Lap Top, relies on her Blackberry for EMail.
• These nudge me more toward the wide-purpose Tablet vs the reader-device. Which may not be an issue as the readers are turning into Tablet-s anyway...

She's mainly favorite-mag-driven, in the sense that she'd have whole issues of a small number of magazines, vs a curated-from-across-the-universe system. Titles she's probably most interested in

• The Economist (doesn't subscribe now, buys latest issue in airport): $110/yr, $29/quarter! ($10/mo Kindle) ($5.49/issue Nook)
• Rolling Stone (doesn't subscribe now, buys latest issue in airport): no digital-only rate, digital is free with $20/yr print subscription, but that's web-only access, no full-issue download.
  • Nov'2011 update: maybe I missed it before, but I just found a Kindle subscription for $3/mo. (Rather a rip-off just to have Off-Line use.)
• Time Mag (currently reads on paper, but maybe she'd drop): $30/yr, or $5/wk (not for Nook)) ($3/wk for Kindle)
• Scientific American (currently reads on paper, but maybe she'd drop): $40/yr, $6/issue (PDF)

Leaving aside the magazine use-case, Marco Arment has some rational reviews of Nooks and Kindles.