And some publishers are happy to do it, because they think Apple will sign up many millions of people to the new service. And they'd rather have a smaller percentage of a bigger number than a bigger chunk of a smaller number.

In the words of a publishing executive who is optimistic about Apple's plans: "It's the absolute dollars paid out that matters, not the percentage."

That argument seems unlikely to persuade the big newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, that Apple is trying to add to its service. Both of them have built their own digital subscription businesses over the past few years, and they may feel that they're better owning 100 percent of a product they control than a piece of a collective run by a giant tech company.

But we'll let Apple - which declined to comment - and its negotiating partners - who don't want to say a word about Apple on the record - sort that for themselves.

But here's a quickish story about how we got here:

Remember the iPad and how it was going to revolutionize the publishing business? People really thought this back in 2009, and that's why  a consortium of publishers, including Conde Nast, Hearst, and Meredith put together a "Netflix for magazines" service, which let subscribers read all the stories they wanted for a monthly fee.

That service, which was eventually called Texture, paid out 10 percent of its monthly revenue to its owner-operators, who divvied it up based on the usage their titles generated. And publishers who sold their stuff through the service but didn't own a piece of Texture captured 50 percent of the revenue, also cut up by usage.

Texture never got much traction, and  last year Apple bought it for an undisclosed sum. It will make up the base of the new subscription service Apple intends to launch for $10 a month.

And after Apple bought Texture, it created new deals for magazine publishers, which gives them about half of the subscription revenue the service generates. Publishers also keep 100 percent of the ad revenue their titles generate.

That's still a very different split than Apple offers video distributors like  HBO, which can keep as much as 85 percent of any revenue generated by a subscription sold through Apple's App Store, or other app developers like Spotify or Fortnite creator Epic Games, which keep 70 percent to 85 percent of the revenue their apps generate via Apple.

Facebook, meanwhile, doesn't capture any revenue when it helps news publishers sell subscriptions - but it doesn't actually sell subscriptions itself. Instead, Facebook directs its users to publishers' sites and lets them handle the deal.

You could argue that since the-thing-formerly-known-as-Texture will be an Apple-owned service, it's fair for Apple to treat it differently than stuff owned by Apple's App Store partners. But that's not terribly convincing, given that the service can't exist without the content. Also, Apple pays out more than 70 percent of its revenue to the music owners that power its Apple Music service.