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Content is king. I remain confident that Apple still knows this and will have something to assure us of that before the iPad 2 hits the shops; perhaps they will give more detail at the March 2nd event. But I won't recommend any iDevices to friends unless they do clear this up.

SJ's comment about publishers versus SaaS gives some hope, but hinges on which services are to be thought of as SaaS; content streaming and eBook readers/stores being to my mind the critical questions remaining.

Ah well, we'll see soon enough.

I worked in publishing for 20 years and even I don't want publishers to automatically have my private subscription data. Many made a business of selling private data before and it is likely they'll do it again. Also, I don't want to have to separately manage all the 10, 20 or 30 different "news" subscriptions I am likely to use over the course of a year. I am quite happy to let Apple help me manage subscriptions so that I can view information I've purchased on any platform I happen to be using at the moment — be it a connected HDTV, a Mac, iPhone or iPad or a page I've printed on my own printer.

As a consumer, I simply don't view Apple's subscription service pricing as greedy. I think it's consumer-friendly. And it's not just about print. Apple has to devise a payment system for all the media I consume, not just "newspapers" or "magazines."

This PC World report is only telling part of the story — and then skewing it against Apple and toward the business interests of PC World and other publishers.

Finally, I simply don't believe publishers who say they can't afford to pay a 30% infrastructure fee to Apple. I KNOW that the printing and delivery of paper publications is MORE than 50% of the costs of old-world analog publishing.

Apple's 30% fee seems low to me.

These days, the only thing publishers have to pay for is content production and the front end of the delivery system (bandwidth to Apple) and storage. As a digital customer, I pay for my own iPad and the bandwidth to receive a publication. Publishers are laying off thousands of creatives to avoid paying expensive employee benefits and lower next-generation wages while also trying to pay current freelance editors, writers and photographers obscenely low rates for content.

The truth is, if publishers can't afford this new system, it's because they've failed to create successful new business models and they still are trying to juggle paying for old-fashioned print publications AND new digital editions while they transition to digital delivery. Dump the paper products and we all can move forward.

GeorgeWedding, on 28 February 2011 - 05:10 PM, said:

I understand why you think this is reasonable, as I did initially, when assuming it affected only "published" media such as newspapers and magazines. But we don't yet know the scope. From what Apple have said thus far, it sounds like it would also apply to services such as music/video streaming services, where the game is quite different. Subscriptions to a music streaming service such as Spotify costs me £10/month. After the record labels take their cut of that, there isn't 30% left for Apple without Spotify taking a heavy loss on each subscription. Their service, unlike a newspaper or magazine, has no real scope for advertising. Finally, their service is cross-platform, so that the £10 charge is the same on any mobile platform, or for the premium PC-based sub. They can't charge more for Apple users by the terms of the subscription policy, since it is mandated that in-app purchases must match or beat any offer from any other means of signing up. So they take the loss, bump prices to all users (regardless of whether they own any iDevices) or pull out of the iOS platform that costs them money on each subscription. I don't want that.

A similar story applies to eBook stores, who would get nothing from book sales once the publishers and Apple get their cuts.

If the service applies only to newspaper and magazine subscriptions, it should be workable—I still have my doubts about how well it would work with publishers offering a buy-once-read-anywhere model, since Apple's cut would again be passed onto non-Apple customers, but at least they know that they can make some kind of profit such that increased readership balances the cost of existing on iOS. I'm worried about those content providers that will see a greater loss the more iOS customers they get. Why bother?