Google is overhauling its approach to serving you articles and news. With "Newsstand" Google's taking another shot at building a one-stop app for all the different stuff you might want to read online. It's a bit like Flipboard meets your magazine subscriptions in a single application for your phone.
Google Play Newsstand replaces the existing Google Play Magazines and Currents app. The former was a central location to house all your subscriptions. The latter was Google's attempt at creating a personalized reader. The hope, it seems, is that Google will be able to lure you into subscriptions with free trials and by surfacing interesting content from all the free-to-read blahgs out there. In those handy tiles above for example, paid content is being heaped together with free stuff. You can read yourself drunk on HuffPo SEO bombs for free, but if you want more than limited access to The Times, it's gonna cost you.
It remains to be seen if this is something people want, though, it is an interesting attempt at generating revenue with a feed of content, which is something that apps like Flipboard have completely failed to do. Without reading too much into this new application, it's a curious product given that other reader product Google killed last summer. [Google Play via ATD]