There’s yet another standoff between Apple and established media companies. While Apple and the recording industry seem to have finally reached something approaching détente if not peace, magazine publishing companies are still wary about letting Apple become the ultimate power in their universe.
Apple is offering the same deal for magazines that they offer for books and app developers: you get 70% of the profits, we take 30% to take care of billing, downloads, etc. Magazine publishers want more: namely, they want access to customer information, especially tidbits like credit card information and email addresses. It’s safe to say that app developers would like that too, especially the email addresses.
According to AllThingsD, that offer has been “on the table for a couple of months,” but no publisher has bitten yet. There are a variety of publishers trying different things, but mostly they seem to be waiting for Android tablets to be released so they can exert some market pressure on Apple. To which I say: good luck with that. I suspect that the only real pressure will be similar to what we’ve seen with audiobooks and music files. Audible.com puts DRM on their files, but they are playable on just about any device you can imagine (I even have a voice recorder that supports Audible playback). Amazon’s music store is the only significant challenger to the iTunes Music Store, and that only happened because they provided DRM-free MP3s, something Apple had wanted to offer for some time. The music industry finally conceded the lack of DRM in return for Apple’s willingness to give “flexible pricing,” which resulted in higher prices for most songs that you’d actually want to buy.
While magazine publishers either roll their own apps or wait it out, more and more readers will find content to read on the devices they already own, and if that isn’t the content magazine publishers are selling, they’ll find something else. Personally, since the creation of Instapaper the idea of a magazine subscription strikes me as quaint. I find more content than I can read already, just through Twitter and Tumblr.
Apple, publishers still debating magazine subscriptions originally appeared on TUAW on Mon, 06 Dec 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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