You may have heard the buzz. Looks like five of the major publishing houses for print magazines (Conde Nast, Meredith, Hearst, News Corp., and Time) have teamed up to create Next Issue Media, an independent venture with a eponymous app for viewing digital magazines on tablets. (Scroll down for a video introduction to the service.)Next Issue seems to be answering a need with some good business sense. Americans apparently love e-reading, and are especially eager to buy magazines on tablet displays. The Big Five have also timed their product well, offering consumers a paid content, subscription-based option early on in the tablet adoption timeline.But they’ve also been smart about their offerings, playing into schema consumers already have about how to buy print content. They offer single issues (comparable to newsstand sales, which consumers do like to do when testing a new publication or are particularly interested in a topic a general magazine is covering in one issue), subscriptions to digital issues of a single magazine (great for aficionados of a publication or print subscribers), and an unlimited subscription plan that works on a cable Model. That is, the unlimited plan has a basic package for $9.99/month, and a premium package for $14.99/month.The app is available on the Android Market Google Play and has a generous 30-day free trial for both the basic and premium plans. The site first asks a visitor to register for an account with simply an email address. You then have to go back and choose one of the plans again to start your free trial by entering a credit card number. This is a two-step process that allows for two best practices — confirming an email address and getting a credit card number when signing up for a free trial.Next Issue is also letting print subscribers get digital editions of the magazines they subscribe to for free. This may be a savvy way to transition print audiences online, but we hope they’ll change this practice and value their digital content separately from print.Here’s that video I promised (ignore the Chariot-of-Fire-like theme music):