Apple looking into ways to beef up magazines in Apple News+

Apple has filed for a patent (number 20190354546) for “generation and presentation of an overview of an electronic magazine issue.” The tech giant seems to be looking to make electronic magazines even more appealing in its Apple News+ service.

The $9.99/month subscription service brings together over 300 popular magazines, leading newspapers, and digital publishers into a curated experience within the Apple News app. Apple says that it would cost over $8,000 to subscribe to all the publications individually.

Here’s the summary of the patent filing: “As may be implemented in accordance with one or more embodiments herein, content in each of a plurality of electronic magazine issues is communicated as follows. One of the plurality of electronic magazine issues is identified for communication with a magazine reader, such as a user reading magazine issues on an end device (e.g., tablet or other computer). At a user display device, and via a user-communication interface medium, an issue cover having an issue name and a cover image is caused to be displayed for the identified magazine issue, as is a summary or overview of articles for the identified magazine issue. For the latter, the display of the issue cover is autonomously caused to be replaced by a set of successive screen pages respectively corresponding to the articles, with each of the successive screen pages including a feature image and article-characterization text associated with one of the articles.”

Of course, Apple files for — and is granted — lots of patents by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Many are for inventions that never see the light of day. However, you never can tell which ones will materialize in a real product.