“In a big win for Apple Inc., Hearst Corp. said it agreed to sell subscriptions to the iPad editions of a range of its magazines through iTunes,” Russell Adams reports for The Wall Street Journal.
“Starting with their July issues, iPad apps for Esquire, Popular Mechanics and O, The Oprah Magazine, will be available through a service from Apple that allows customers to sign up for subscriptions inside the apps and get billed automatically,” Adams reports. “Subscriptions to all three publications will be sold for $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. Hearst said it will eventually sell newspaper apps and other content it owns on a subscription basis through iTunes, too.”
“Hearst is the first major magazine publisher to commit to selling subscriptions to multiple titles through it,” Adams reports. “Apple stipulates that publishers can sell digital content for Apple devices on their own websites, but any content they make available directly to consumers also has to be offered in the App Store for the same price or lower. Furthermore, Apple takes 30% of all sales in the App Store. But without the App Store, publishers must ask iPad users to download a new issue each week or month, and pay separately for each issue.”
Adams reports, “Over the course of recent talks with Apple, however, publishers have become more comfortable with the terms under which their titles will be sold in the App Store, according to people familiar with the talks. Executives also say Apple has shown more flexibility on pricing… As for the information sharing, publishers say they rely on knowing some basics about readers to court advertisers and market their other products to consumers. But publishing executives say they are more confident they will be able to work within Apple’s guidelines to find out who their iPad readers are.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: $1.99 a month or $19.99 a year. Now we’re getting somewhere!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Fred Mertz” and “Angel C.” for the heads up.]