Report: Cond? Nast Springs Ahead of Hearst With iPad Subscription Pact

Welcome to the future ? it only costs $19.99.

Cond? Nast, the publisher of Vogue, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, GQ and Wired, is on the verge of announcing a pact with Apple to begin selling digital subscriptions to its iPad applications, according to the New York Post?s Keith J. Kelly.

The New Yorker will become the first of Cond??s magazines to be offered, Kelly reported, but by the end of May, seven other Cond? titles will be available, including Vanity Fair, GQ, Glamour, Allure, Self, Golf Digest and Wired. That means Cond? Nast will win some measure of bragging rights over its rival, Hearst, which this week said that it would begin offering iPad subscriptions for the July editions of several of its magazines, including Popular Mechanics, Esquire, and O, The Oprah Magazine, which will become available in June.

Details on the digital subscription pricing scheme remain unclear, but Kelly reported that the single-copy price of the digital version of The New Yorker and GQ will be slashed from $5 to $2, and Wired will drop from $4 to $2. Annual subscriptions for each of the digital titles will be $20.

This week has seen a flurry of digital media activity by the Big Three publishers, Time, Hearst and Cond? Nast, and one can almost feel the ground moving underfoot as the landscape shifts. On Monday, Time announced a deal with Apple to provide its magazine subscribers with access to the iPad versions of its publications. Late Wednesday, word emerged of the Hearst deal.

And on Friday, Kelly reported the imminent Cond? pact. Cond? Nast declined to comment.

Taken together, these developments mark something of a sea change in the attitudes of the giant publishers toward Apple and its App Store subscription model. For several months, the publishers and the tech juggernaut have been wrangling over several aspects of the new digital subscription system, which ? let?s face it ? everyone knew would eventually be embraced.

The most contentious issue? Apple?s insistence that it control the data readers submit when they subscribe to the magazine apps through the App Store, a stipulation the publishers had objected to. Apple seemed to budge somewhat in February when it said that readers could ?opt-in? and choose to send the publishers their personal information, although it remains to be seen how many people will actually do that. Industry sources have been mum on this point all week, but it appears that the publishers? concerns have been assuaged somewhat, although the particulars of the arrangement remain unclear.

Apple, which has already revolutionized at least three industries ? and is well on its way to a fourth ? will keep 30 percent of the subscription revenue. According to Kelly, print magazine subscribers will receive access to the digital versions at no extra charge.

Source: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/05/conde-nast-springs/

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