The great e-magazine control freak strikes again: CNet and AppleInsider are reporting that Apple has told a number of European newspaper and magazine publishers that they will not be allowed to offer free iPad magazine e-subscriptions to print subscribers through Apple’s e-newsstand app.

The publishers are not terribly pleased about this, but from a neutral point of view it’s hard to fault Apple’s position. After all, Apple can’t extract a 30% agent’s fee from money that doesn’t pass through their store. This is also why the only e-book app allowed to offer in-app purchases is iBooks. Publishers may not like it, but if they want to play in Apple’s walled garden, they’re going to have to pay the price of an entry ticket.

But why on earth should magazine publishers continue to play in Apple’s walled garden, anyhow? If they really want to offer free e-subscriptions to their paper subscribers, why constrain themselves to the narrow boundaries of an app? Look at Ars Technica, for instance. They offer a full RSS feed of their articles to paying subscribers (who can also view the articles on the website itself without ads and in single-page format), while freeloaders can get a truncated feed.

There’s nothing stopping print magazine publishers from doing the same, and this would have the added advantage of being able to read it across a wide variety of RSS readers in a multitude of formats. For that matter, they could also offer a full web version to print subscribers (as The Economist does) and that could be read on even more platforms.

Or perhaps they could make a deal with Flipboard, who have already begun offering content from selected partner sites through their application. I can’t imagine it would be too hard to add subscriber-only content, and it would look even better than reading it in an RSS feed.

Come on, magazine publishers! If you don’t want to pay the piper, there’s no need to dance to his tune.

8 COMMENTS

  1. Well the answer is simple.

    They want the benefits of the walled garden with greater control over who accesses their content and how they can use that content that Apple plainly provides as part of it’s app environment.
    But… They don’t want to do any paying for those services.

  2. Imagine what a horrible mess it would be for apple to implement this business model. How is apple supposed to know if a user is a print subscriber? Token codes? How do these get controlled, managed and transmitted. Chris is right.

    Remember, publishers are allowed to have free apps that get enhanced for subscribers. They just have to decide between collecting money through apple, or not through apple.

  3. I am really over-tired of this ‘walled garden’ BS.

    I also find the opening statement “The great e-magazine control freak strikes again” followed a few lines later by “from a neutral point of view it’s hard to fault Apple’s position” So which is it ? Some schizophrenia appears to have broken out ….

    Apple are absolutely smart to take this line and I cannot see any other business doing anything different. Why would they offer their selling channel to other businesses that won’t be paying any fee, but earning whopping fees in advertising ? Does it make any sense to you ?
    Imagine the iPhone/iPad is instead the New York Times newspaper. NYT controls everything that goes into the paper right ? Imagine if they changed their advertising pricing strategy over to charging a percentage of the sales achieved by the advertisers. Imagine then if advertisers started selling their products free but allowed Insurance companies and lawyers and breakfast cereal makers to put ad advert for their product within the newspaper ad, for a whopping fee ? How do you think NYT would feel ?

    This is a storm in a teacup. Also why do they not want to deliver their free service through RSS ? perhaps it offers less advertising opportunity … additionally they can’t offer it as a free service and then switch on a fee after a year as they could with an app.

  4. How will this affect other ebook readers on the iPad? The Nook reader and Kindle come to mind. I purchase Nook ebooks from B&N and then download them to my iPad. I don’t purchase any books through iTunes. The same applies to Zinio. I purchased half a dozen magazine subscriptions through Zinio on my PC. I then download the magazines on my iPad. I don’t think Apple is getting a cut of any of these purchases.

  5. How will this affect other ebook readers on the iPad? The Nook reader and Kindle come to mind. I purchase Nook ebooks from B&N and then download them to my iPad. I don’t purchase any books through iTunes. The same applies to Zinio. I purchased half a dozen magazine subscriptions through Zinio on my PC. I then download the magazines on my iPad. I don’t think Apple is getting a cut of any of these purchases.

    Hi, uh, jgrnt1 . I didn’t see any particulars in the linked articles. I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that Apple is balking at having to pay for the storage, bandwidth, etc for magazine issue files on their servers while magazine publishers make a profit (through subscriptions) and don’t give them a cut.

    In the case of Zinio, Kindle, etc. Apple doesn’t keep the issues or books on their servers–Zinio, Amazon, etc. do. I assume Apple has no objection to that. Thus, I don’t think this will affect other ebook readers or Zinio.

  6. Raja99,

    I understand your point. I was reading this as an attempt by Apple to get paid for anything which gets downloaded to the iPad for reading, not to recover bandwidth and storage costs. Though the article is clear that this applies only to Apple’s e-newsstand, I was wondering whether this was just a first step.

  7. There’s been a little paranoia on the matter ever since Apple announced first taking a cut for in-app purchases, then iBooks. Would Apple decide to declare itself the only game in town?

    But e-books with separate stores seem to have been “grandfathered in”. They were at least partly responsible for the rapid adoption of the iPhone platform, and for Apple to decide all of a sudden that they were no longer kosher would tick off a lot of people who’d already bought the devices.

    On the other hand, iPadgazines haven’t really taken off yet, and since Apple is getting in on the ground floor they don’t have as much to lose from starting off “right” from the beginning.

    Of course, as I pointed out above, if magazine publishers are serious about wanting to offer print subscribers a free online version, they don’t need to be shackled to an iPad app as long as they go with something that can be read by existing apps. I mean, if they go with an RSS feed, it can be downloaded for offline reading just as an app could. Sure the formatting might not be quite as fancy, but I don’t think people necessarily want fancy formatting anyway.

The TeleRead community values your civil and thoughtful comments. We use a cache, so expect a delay. Problems? E-mail newteleread@gmail.com.