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Apple Impasse With Magazines Over Subscriber Data
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."
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.
The publishing industry, being the sole supplier of many popular magazines and newspapers, refused to release those magazines and newspapers in ebook format until a hardware manufacturer agreed to all their onerous DRM requirements. Apple was the only one who took them up on the offer, and the iPad was the result. Now they're finding out some of the problems that come with having to deal with a sole supplier (in this case, for the hardware platform on which your electronic publications are distributed). Serves them right I say. Pot, meet kettle.
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.