“Time Inc’s stable of 20 magazines, including Sports Illustrated and People, are now available for subscription on Apple’s Newsstand, the company said on Thursday,” Jennifer Saba reports for Reuters.
“The publishing arm of Time Warner Inc was the last holdout, among large magazine companies, to agree to sell subscriptions through Apple Newsstand,” Saba reports. “Prior to the announcement, consumers have had to go through each magazine’s website to get a digital subscription for the iPad.”
Saba reports, “Existing print subscribers of Time Inc will be able to access the digital editions at no additional cost… Apple has wanted to be the primary contact for magazine subscribers, essentially controlling valuable information like addresses and other demographic details. Magazines, too, are keen on this data, which they use to sell advertising. Subscribers may choose to share their data with the publisher, a process known in the industry as ‘opting in.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Once again, Apple stands up for their customers and Apple’s customers win.
With App Store subscriptions, Apple’s on the side of the consumer yet again. Anytime you read differently, it’s highly likely coming from a publication that wants to continue to be able to force your name, address, telephone number, email address, credit card number, credit card security code, job title, job responsibility, and industry from you at the time of subscription. We’d rather have Apple closely hold the data than have it strewn among media companies for them to sell to marketeers. – MacDailyNews, September 21, 2011
Related articles:
Apple iPad apps far outnumber rivals; $70k spent per day on iPad Newsstand publications – March 28, 2012
Hearst Magazines prez: Apple’s iPad ‘a pretty efficient distribution for us to be honest’ – December 1, 2011
Apple’s Newsstand really was a present for publishers – December 23, 2011
iPad magazine readers to publishers: More, please – November 21, 2011
Apple iOS 5′s Newsstand boosts Future Publishing’s sales by 750% – October 18, 2011
French papers team up in attempt to force Apple into concessions on subscriptions – September 21, 2011
I’ve got no time for Time or any other mags under its collective. So it not being available in Apple’s Newsstand was no great loss for me. But for those that enjoy that sort of stuff, I guess it is good news for them.
That’s right, it is. AND we’ll support their decision by participating.
Regardless of what you think of the genre, tens-of-millions welcome this news. It’s important for the media to embrace technology and not fight with it.
I value Time because its a vast repository of world history. We can discuss the merits of the stewardship and strategies to put the editorial staff back on point, but until we all get on the same page, Spin, Rinse, and Repeat is the name of the game.
I would love it, if my television glowed red when someone was lying to the camera. In fact, all politicians should be forced to debate on public television; we’d get to the truth sooner or later.
Talk about a race to revive newspapers and magazines! fsck the rain forest! We need more paper. And no more television appearances.
Now if we could just get the Wall Street Journal to play nice.
Agreed. Murdoch is clueless with the way they have handled their subscriptions.
The link to the original article should be
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/14/net-us-time-apple-subscriptions-idUSBRE85D0YP20120614
All these stories start out at Reuters. Well, a good many, anyway. (Why do you think it looks like a concerted effort by the mainstream media to castigate Apple all the time? They rely on Reuters!)
They don’t have tech people manning the desks in the mainstream media, they’re all in the basement. So when a Reuters story hits the syndication circuit, it’s all over the news. Even if it’s a yellow journo, once it gets out in syndication, it’s too late to reel it back in.
iPad Mags (looking as regular mags) are a mistake.
Content via app is the law. See Siri sport results… and so on.
Pure articles… clean HD photos… no art ‘news design’… ads… periodicity…
Interactive/updatable books are nice… mag/newspaper are dead media, even on iPad.
You know, by the time your thirty, magazines will be a totally immersive experience for the written word, just as 3D video will be for the theater; enveloped in sight and sound and touch, navigating to where our mind takes us.
We will become the magazine, just as sure as we will become characters in our own 3D movies.
Content will populate our tablets while scanning headlines and when our eyes light upon something interesting, dwelling longer than a second and it will appear in our reading list. Others will merely use magazines for a pure graphical experience and verbiage is reduced to a couple of topical lines. Which is the way many of my colleagues read today’s papers; the continuity between stories is so good, you can go a day just skimming headlines, and still be in the loop making informed decisions.
With a 24-hour news cycle and the fact that it is 8AM in the morning somewhere every minute of the day, it’s a race to the death! If it leads, it bleeds will become the most popular magazines on the market.