Slashdot Mirror
Time Inc. Signs Magazine Deal With Apple
redletterdave writes "Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the U.S., has decided to embrace digital distribution. On Thursday, Time Inc. announced that it will make all of its magazines available over the Newsstand application built by Apple. The agreement was confirmed by Time Inc. CEO Laura Lang and Apple's senior VP of Internet software development Eddy Cue. The two company executives agreed to allow Apple Newsstand users to subscribe to more than 20 magazines owned by Time Inc., including Sports Illustrated, People, and Entertainment Weekly."
Time already offers digital subscriptions. All this does is add the ability to subscribe through Newsstand. A nice win for Apple, but it sounds like Time got the concessions they wanted in order to make the deal.
when Apple stop being Mormons and you can buy Playboy!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Dude!... Write a fucking backend.
Make it process orders in one step for 400M users -- it needs to scale accordingly, btw.
Make it deal with refunds, chargebacks, reverse-chargebacks, complaints, fraud, yada yada, pretty much anything that can go wrong when you do business.
Make it manage subscriptions, including cancellations. And rentals. And DRM.
Make it deal with taxes in 150+ countries, including local variations where applicable.
Make it do your monthly accounting, including subcontractor payments.
Make it provide all sorts of metrics to your subcontractors, too.
Oh, and QA test anything your subcontractors send you, too. Check for malware, crashes, etc., anything that might make those millions of end-users unsatisfied.
Do all that, and more, and you'll appreciate how 30% is a bargain.
Alternatively, just shut up. Because you've absolutely no fucking clue how hard it is to create and operate a backend.