The new magazine company would, in theory, make it easy to buy print and electronic copies of publications like The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, Esquire and Better Homes and Gardens from a single Web site. While mostly leaving the hardware to others, the alliance of competing publishers would develop software standards for magazine viewing on iPhones, BlackBerrys, e-book readers and other platforms, people with knowledge of the plans said.

Executives have talked about an iTunes model for magazines for months.

This is only going to work if 1) in addition to being able to buy an entire magazine, people also can buy individual articles (Just like you can buy individual songs on iTunes, not just entire albums); and 2) they price it LOW (How much are people going to be willing to pay for an individual article, which is typically read once? Not much, I'm guessing.)

The success of the iTunes model is separability of songs from albums and getting the price down to a reasonable amount that people will pay. Oh yeah, and an efficient buying/delivery model that works on a variety of devices.