Apple is quite picky when it comes to allowing publications inside its subscription plan for the iPad, but starting today, Apple is adding Bloomberg Businessweek along with Elle, Maxim and Popular Science. The digital subscription is $2.99 and it allows users to read editions in portrait or landscape mode, search through a personal archive, resize fonts and share articles by email, Twitter and Facebook. It is becoming less and less common having free editions in the iPad world of publishing, as last month Conde Nast decided to increase the prices for GQ and Vanity Fair editions for the iPad.

A study carried out by the Audit Bureau of Circulation at the end of 2010 reveals that sales for digital issues of Vanity Fair, Wired, Glamour and GQ magazine registered a considerable decrease. Add to this the new e-reading service that come up on the market, such as Kobo that is expanding to Europe, namely in Germany and Spain at the beginning of May and afterwards to France, Italy and the Netherlands.

Much of this situation is attributed to Apple’s new subscription plan announced earlier this year, in February that created quite a fuss in the publishing industry. After the 30 percent fee required by Apple for all subscribers signing up, and its reluctance to offer publishers subscriber data, some publishers approached iPad subscriptions, whereas others are still reluctant and refuse to work with Apple. One such example is Financial Times who is now relying solely on its website to share its content on a subscription base, refusing to reconsider Apple’s services.

“We don’t want to lose our direct relationship with our subscribers. It’s at the core of our business model,” Rob Grimshaw, managing director of the Financial Times‘s flagship website, ft.com. “If it turns out that one or another channel doesn’t mix with the way we want to do business, there’s a large number of other channels available to us.”

But competitors such as Google are playing their cards well. Google introduced the Google Books Android app in its webstore, leaving room for rumours of extending the Android Marketplace offer from e-books to movies and music.