Stephen Northcott has written an excellent piece outlining the importance of AirPrint which was announced by Apple a couple of days ago. He outlines how this plays out for the bigger goal of providing a better solution for newspaper and magazine publishers.
Australian newsagents will be interested in this paragraph from Northcott’s report:
One big bone of contention between magazines, newspapers and Apple has always been the rules around collecting user data. User data is the holy grail of any kind of targeted, ad laden media. As we all know! The rub there is that Apple has insisted on allowing users to opt out of this kind of data harvesting if they like. Chalk one up for us, the consumer, there.
As distribution newsagents know, the data they have collected over the years through hard work is now considered to be by the publishers to be theirs. Publishers use this data to switch newsagent direct customers to lower value subscription customers.