Imagine the World's Best Doctor's Waiting Room...

There are a couple of interesting developments on the magazine distribution front that are worth looking at.

The first one is Portfolio's takeout on Maghound, Time Warner's plan to turn magazine subscriptions into an a la carte business: basically, you'll be able to decide which issues of which magazines you take on a subscription, switching back and forth between Time, People, Sports Illustrated and 100-plus other magazines. The idea is that you'll pay a set fee of a few bucks a month and then choose what mags you want delivered to you. 

I'm not sure magazine subscribers are truly that eclectic and fickle. Do you really want to have to manage your magazine choices every month? The whole point of a subscription, after all, is a sort of set-it-and-forget-it model. Still, it's an interesting approach that might find a nice niche market.

Far more fascinating–and pernicious–is something called Mygazines.com, which is urging people to scan and upload magazines so that they can be shared among the company's 16,000–and growing–members. Oprah, Wired, BusinessWeek, Men's Health, you name it–virtual copies of the latest issues are sitting on the Mygazines site for your perusal, just as if you're sitting in a doctor's waiting room surrounded by piles of fresh magazines. (The company apparently draws that parallel, in fact.) None of this is authorized by the publishers, natch.

Ding ding ding ding ding! That alarm you hear is the copyright police going completely nuclear on this wacky concept, which claims to be based on the first-sale and fair use doctrines in copyright law. The company behind it has the advantage of being based on the Caribbean island of Anguilla (a British territory), and thus is harder to prosecute under U.S. law. The company's ownership (the URL is registered to a John Smith, for instance) sounds pretty dodgy, too.

Nice try. As an AP story on the new service points out, copyright lawyers don't think much of this idea, and the publishers that employ those lawyers will think even less of it. You'd better hurry and get over to Mygazines for a look before the cops–or maybe Interpol–get there.

Comments

[edward]

Wow, if you thought newspaper stocks had fallen quite a bit, Morningstar says they have a hell of a lot further to go. It's sort of in-line with what you have been forecasting here for several months, so it won't come as much of a suprise to you. But I am not sure I can be this pessimistic:
http://news.morningstar.com/articlenet/article.aspx?id=249734

[Julie Starr]

>I'm not sure magazine subscribers are truly >that eclectic and fickle. Do you really want >to have to manage your magazine choices every >month? The whole point of a subscription, >after all, is a sort of set-it-and-forget-it >model. Still, it's an interesting approach >that might find a nice niche market.

I think that's a great idea. I'm exactly fickle enough to buy into it. Whenever I subscribe to a magazine it ends up piling up in the corner unread and reproachful - either because I'm busy or bored with it.

To be able to mix up my subscriptions - say, let me take every second Economist, every third Time and every second New Scientist issues - would be perfect.

That said, it would only be perfect if it was super easy to manage, and if I could manage it myself online with no daft penalties for changing my mind.