Apple Impasse With Magazines Over Subscriber Data 243
Pickens writes "Peter Kafka reports at All Things Digital that Apple and the publishing industry haven't been able to come to terms over magazine app subscriptions. Publishers want the ability to sell the subscriptions themselves, or at least the opportunity to hang on to subscribers' personal data, and Steve Jobs won't let them. Publishers also don't like the 30 percent cut that Apple wants to take in the iTunes store, but their real hang-up is lack of access to credit card and personal data. It's valuable to them for marketing because the demographic data helps magazines sell advertising, and without it they can't offer print/digital bundles. All Apple is willing to offer is an opt-in form for subscribers that would ask them for a limited amount of information: name, mailing address, email address."
Good for Apple (Score:5, Interesting)
I cancelled my subscriptions to Make Magazine and Utne Reader for exactly that reason - the asshats couldn't stop themselves from selling my personal data to advertisers. Within two months, I was getting both paper and email spam from all over the place because of them. I know it was them because I always use custom email addresses and custom misspellings of my name to track how companies use my data.
Deal with the devil (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Credit Card data? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm going to make the same argument, but in the opposite direction.
If I call the magazine to purchase a subscription and have the magazine delivered by USPS, neither the phone company nor the post office needs my credit card data.
The phone lines and postage need to be paid for, but those parties need no access to the particulars of my transaction with the magazine company.
Likewise, Apple is just connecting one entity to another. If I've paid Apple for the iPad and paid AT&T for the bandwidth, why does either need to know which credit card I used for the magazine subscription?
If Apple's business model depends on selling me the hardware and software and getting a kick back on all data passing through the device, too bad for them.
Re:Credit Card data? (Score:2, Interesting)
And while I agree, I think the whole argument slams smack-dab into the walls around the walled garden. If you want to have your software on an iPod, iPhone, iPad, etc, that software has to be sold through Apple (barring jailbreaking, which does not a viable business model make).
What if I wanted to buy a subscription to Android Magazine for my iPad so I could read up on it? Apple can deny the publishers the right to sell their magazine for use on my device, and (without jailbreaking) there's no way I can buy it. And if selling an app requires jailbreaking, most publishers know their subscription numbers hardly justify building out an app for it.
More to the point, what if I wanted to buy software and didn't want to use my Apple account for it? What if I wanted to use a different credit card, or wanted to go to a brick-and-mortar and pay cash to install something? Nope, Apple purchases go through the Apple store, and that's that.
I'm not saying that the model is inherently wrong - it's got its advantages and disadvantages that have been discussed to death already. But it does mean that you can't buy any software for your iOS-based device except exclusively from Apple, and they get to decide who they do business with.
The walls can protect you, and they can restrict your motion. You have to choose whether you accept the restrictions that go with the protections. If you can't, don't get locked into a multi-year contract with the thing.
I have an older iPod Touch, and for the most part if I had a choice, I'd PREFER software that is available in the Apple Store. It's been vetted out to an extent, I'm only giving payment information to one vendor (decreasing the likelihood of credit card breaches), and all that. But I think it would be nice (in a "I'm not going to be able to get this anyway, so I might as well dream" sort of way) to have a competitive marketplace for applications on the platform so I can stray from the path if I want.
It's not a deal-killer for the iPod because I won it in a contest, and I really only use it to listen to music (via my already-purchased library and imported CDs, not iTunes) and run a few free apps. It's not my phone or anything terribly important to me, and when the battery finally dies it'll get installed permanently in a music player docking station and I won't lament the loss of the other features too much.
But the point is, it's Apple's playground, and Steve hands out the marbles. There are other playgrounds if you don't like Steve's rules, but the point of these stories is to make those rules clear to people about to make a buying decision. Many people are very comfortable with the walled garden, and that's fine, just understand that the top of the walls have razor wire on them, and you aren't getting out.