It’s been said iPads are the future of newspapers and magazines, but just how much are people spending on digital editions?A new study finds iPad users spend more than $70,000 every day on the top 100 newspaper and magazine apps in Apple’s Newsstand. That’s $25.5 million a year — an impressive number when you consider the fact that Newsstand has only been around for six months, but still small compared to traditional channels.The New York Times, for example, which has the second highest-grossing Newsstand app, after News Corp’s The Daily, rakes in $705 million annually or $1.9 million a day in circulation both print and digital and $756 million in advertising, or $2.1 million a day. So whatever portion of that daily $70,000 The Times brings in from selling its app is very small compared to the income from its print circulation for now, anyway.Distimo is a Dutch research firm that tracks the mobile apps that are developed for and distributed through Apple’s online App Store and similar marketplaces run by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and others.Other interesting finds from the study:- China has the US beat when it comes to daily downloads of free apps. The country tallied more than 1.1 million daily downloads from within the top 300 most popular free apps. The US tallied “just below” one million daily downloads.- The US is still the top-grossing country, when it comes to iPad app spending. It is trailed by Australia, Canada, and the UK.- iPad users download lots of weather apps. One of the omissions from Apple’s iPad version of iOS is a built-in weather app. That has led to some serious downloading, Distimo said. While the number of downloads is nowhere near the same class as things like entertainment, travel, or photography, the study found the number of downloads for weather apps to be considerably higher than how many such apps are available.