Rumors have already surfaced about the News-Corp-produced iPad newspaper The Daily, and in a few weeks the company may be ready to formally fire up the digital-only presses. According to John Gruber of Daring Fireball, Apple and News Corp will tentatively launch The Daily on December 9, and Apple will allegedly also announce subscriptions through iTunes, allowing customers to receive automatically delivered newspapers and magazines to their iPads.
At the moment, iPad users are forced to download and pay for digital issues of a publication one at a time. In addition to this being moderately inconvenient, it also keeps consumer information out of publishers’ hands. Which is why, up to this point, publishers haven’t warmed to the idea of rolling subscriptions through the App Store. Apple’s refusal to share subscriber data limits publishers’ ability to target their audiences for advertising and marketing purposes.
There are now rumors that Apple will offer iPad users an opt-in option, which will grant publishers user information. Such a compromise would finally allow customers to subscribe to their favorite magazines and newspapers. More intriguing is that for a subscription billing transaction to work in iTunes, the iPad would require a software update. So along with The Daily’s official launch and the purported introduction of subscriptions, could we also be seeing a release date for iOS 4.3 on December 9?
