It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find a variety of death knells for the newspaper and magazine industry. With the public’s increasing dislike of actually paying to read stuff, the publishing industry is right up there with music labels and encyclopedia salesmen on the Once Promising Future, Destroyed by The Internet list. The New York Times is about to lay off 100 people. Media giant Conde Nast shut down four of their magazines, including Gourmet, which has been around for 68 years. And The Onion has even taken to mocking the industry by suggesting that the majority of newspapers are now purchased just so kidnappers can prove what date it is.

But with all that bad news, a tiny ray of light has appeared for the publishing industry. And it’s coming from a somewhat suprising source. That beacon of hope has arrived in the form of a seemingly insignificant change to the way Apple runs its App Store, combined with the promise of Apple’s new tablet computer. As of last week, the company now allows extra content to be purchased from within free applications. There are lots of ramifications of this policy tweak, but as Wired magazine points out, one of the biggest beneficiaries of this change could be magazine and newspaper publishers.

The idea is that people might actually be inclined to read newspapers and magazines on a tablet. Unlike the Kindle, say, a tablet will offer a rich reading experience, complete with photos, multi-media and all that good stuff. And according to Wired, newspapers and magazines could hook readers by giving away some of their content via a free app, but then charging people for additional content, from within that free app. As the ridiculous success of Apple’s App Store has proven, people seem willing to pay for content and applications, as long as its relatively inexpensive, and the actual mechanism of paying is easy and convenient. With in-app payment now allowed in free applications, both those criteria could be achieved for newspapers and magazines.

As with everything related to all this new-fangled technology, only time will tell if the publishing industry can benefit from the combination of a good content-delivery platform (Apple’s tablet computer) and easy-and-convenient payment options (in-app purchasing). But if the people calling the shots in that industry have any sense, they’ll do whatever they can to try to make it work.

Related posts:

1. Anticipation builds over new Apple tablet
2. Apple Developers Conference Highlights iPhone Software Upgrade
3. Music biz and Apple go retro to spur music sales

Tags: Apple, eCommerce, tablet

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