Four countries are now the recipients of an advanced birthday gift from Google. Well, that is, if they actually were hankering to be able to access paid content from the Google Newsstand. India, the Netherlands, Russia and Spain were added to the list of countries that can now buy newspapers and magazines from the Newsstand, joining a very “elite” number of countries that can do so.
While the Google Play Newsstand app itself is available for download worldwide, it only acts as a newsfeed reader for the rest of the world, except for the following countries: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, United Kingdom and the United States. And now, the four countries we mentioned earlier have joined that group that can access paid content from selected publishers.
India was the first one to be added, with around 30 publications like Indiatimes, NDTV, the Hindustan Times among those who were offering more specialised (and therefore paid) content. Then users from the Netherlands, Russia and Spain started noticing that they had access to more than just websites when they opened their Google Play Newsstand.
As to why they are still limiting it to just 11 countries for now is still a mystery. But given how other Google services like Books, Movies, Music and All Access slowly rolled out to more regions, we can expect this to expand as well. If you don’t have Newsstand yet on your Android device (some are built-in already), you can download it for free from the Google Play Store. But if you don’t live in any of the aforementioned countries, then just enjoy your news reader.
SOURCE: Google
