Time Inc. has managed defeat an impasse between the publisher and Apple over giving free access to print subscribers. Apparently, Apple was against this allowance, insisting that everyone pay the stated price of the app. Now, people who subscribe to the dead tree versions of People, Time, Sports Illustrated and Fortune will be able to get the issues for free on their iPad with their subscription.
The disagreement between Apple and the publishers apparently lasted 4.5 months, an unusually long period of time, because, as Fortune points out:
It’s not clear what took so long. Publishers who were encouraged to build iPad apps by Steve Jobs himself say were ready from the start to make them free to subscribers. Until now, however, Apple would neither give them the tools they needed, nor explain what was holding them up. The publishers still can’t sell subscriptions through the App Store, which is how they would prefer to do it.
You know what’s still missing from the equation? In-app subscriptions. You still have to buy the new issue from the app store every month, which makes no sense at all. You should just be able to subscribe for as long as you want from within the app, and just have them download in the background automatically,
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