Fortune has released a Kindle eBook entitled “All About Steve, The Story of Steve Jobs and Apple from the Pages of Fortune. This is not to be confused with the authorized biography; that is not due until November. This book is written by the writers of Fortune and is based on past interviews and articles which appeared in the pages of Fortune.

Steve Jobs’ legacy is clear: The most innovative business leader of our time, the man FORTUNE named CEO of the Decade in 2009. Now from the pages of FORTUNE comes an anthology of 17 classic stories spanning the years 1983 to 2011 about the cultural icon who revolutionized computing, telephones, movies, music, retailing, and product design.

Source: Amazon

A bunch of print newspapers and magazines seem to be finally jumping on board the iPad subscription train, including The Telegraph (UK), Heart properties including Esquire, Popular Mechanics, and O, The Oprah Magazine, and Time has somehow swung a deal to get existing Time, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated readers free access via iPad.

And, of course, Playboy is coming uncensored (my guess is web app, no iOS-handled subscriptions).

Meanwhile the launched-with-much-todo The Daily has reportedly gotten 800K downloads but is losing $10 million a month.

The big stumbling block was, is, and remains Apple’s insistence that users opt-in to sharing their demographic data with publishers (while the publishers would prefer opt-out since they figure — probably rightly — few users will actively choose to share). Publishers have historically relied on demographics and marketing against them as a key revenue source. Another problem has been getting users to pay for content that they’ve gotten used to getting free on the web — especially when publishers have asked fairly high prices (sometimes higher than print!)

So with more and more heavy hitters hitting the platform, but with everyone still struggling to figure out the business model, what does the future hold for iPad subscriptions? Do we need an iMags/iNews store like iBooks? Or is it just the wrong medium for an outdated message?

What will it take to get you to subscribe?

[FT, WSJ, WSJ, MediaMemo]

What with the shareholders meeting yesterday and the SDK event tomorrow, Apple’s often reclusive CEO is downright chatty this week!

Hot on the heels of Fortune Magazine’s stories on Apple being “America’s Most Admired Company” and the almost yang to its yin of “The trouble with Steve Jobs” comes the title-case-challenged interview: “Steve Jobs speaks out“

Amazing insights abound, starting right off with the Birth of the iPhone!

“We all had cellphones. We just hated them, they were so awful to use. The software was terrible. The hardware wasn’t very good. We talked to our friends, and they all hated their cellphones too. Everybody seemed to hate their phones. And we saw that these things really could become much more powerful and interesting to license. It’s a huge market. I mean a billion phones get shipped every year, and that’s almost an order of magnitude greater than the number of music players. It’s four times the number of PCs that ship every year.

“It was a great challenge. Let’s make a great phone that we fall in love with. And we’ve got the technology. We’ve got the miniaturization from the iPod. We’ve got the sophisticated operating system from Mac. Nobody had ever thought about putting operating systems as sophisticated as OS X inside a phone, so that was a real question. We had a big debate inside the company whether we could do that or not. And that was one where I had to adjudicate it and just say, ‘We’re going to do it. Let’s try.’ The smartest software guys were saying they can do it, so let’s give them a shot. And they did.”

Not to mention this little bombshell:

Take the iPhone. We had a different enclosure design for this iPhone until way too close to the introduction to ever change it. And I came in one Monday morning, I said, ‘I just don’t love this. I can’t convince myself to fall in love with this. And this is the most important product we’ve ever done.’

“And we pushed the reset button. We went through all of the zillions of models we’d made and ideas we’d had. And we ended up creating what you see here as the iPhone, which is dramatically better. It was hell because we had to go to the team and say, ‘All this work you’ve [done] for the last year, we’re going to have to throw it away and start over, and we’re going to have to work twice as hard now because we don’t have enough time.’ And you know what everybody said? ‘Sign us up.’

Whatcha waiting for? Get reading!