With the advent of the Internet, digital media, and ebooks print media has been looking for a way to stay connected to and garner more consumers. Time Inc. and Apple have gotten together to provide a model for bundling both print and digital sales for subscribers. Jeremy W. Peters of the New York Times writes,

The question of whether media companies should charge for their digital offerings and risk having fewer people view their content is one of the most urgent issues facing the business today. Other magazine publishers, like Condé Nast, have no plans to give digital content away as part of a print subscription. Condé Nast is devising a pricing structure for print-digital packages, but the prices are expected to exceed current subscription prices.

But Time Inc., which believes strongly that its print subscribers should have access to its digital products without having to pay more, has made the decision to pursue a strategy that favors higher numbers of users over maximizing consumer profits.

Traditional publishing has taken a lot of hits recently with the recession and the availability of digital content, so it stands to reason that large print publishers would want to take advantage of every revenue stream. Consumers of People Magazine are likely to overlap with people who own iPads and thus get some of their news online. The addition of this bundle should provide a powerful value-added element to subscribing to the Magazine.

It might get even better if the application enables subscribers to store past issues on their iPad so that they can look back into the past (recent or far) to recollect old articles they read. It will also permit People Magazine subscribers to carry their reading with them during their day without adding another periodical to their baggage.

While there are those who won’t want to give up the physical medium—the magazine itself—the significance of also having a digitally accessible version will be hard to pass up.