Bloomberg Businessweek is the latest iPad subscription magazine
Fortune Tech is reporting that another major magazine publisher has agreed to Apple's terms for iTunes magazine subscriptions, increasing the grand total to ... four.
Bloomberg Businessweek (free iPad app) joins Maxim, Elle and Popular Science as the fourth magazine to provide subscriptions through iTunes. Most magazine publishers are unwilling to cede Apple 30 percent of the take of subscriptions and have chosen to sell individual issues for the iPad instead. For many of the publishers, it's not really the fact that they'll only make 70 percent of the sales price of the magazine subscription; they're more concerned that subscribers will not agree to share their personal information for market research purposes.
The app is free to download, at which time you can buy a subscription through in-app purchase. A subscription to Bloomberg Businessweek will sell for US$2.99 per month, the same price as a subscription to Elle. Popular Science weighs in at $14.99 annually, or $1.25 an issue.
Now that a respected business magazine has joined the small group of publishers that have decided that the iTunes model might actually work, we can only hope that some of the other magazine publishers may follow suit. Such heavyweights in the industry as Time, Inc. (Time and Sports Illustrated), Condé Nast (New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Wired) and Hearst (Cosmpolitan, Esquire) are still refusing to embrace the Apple model.
