Want to read a wealth of magazines without spending a dime on subscriptions or one-time transactions? A website by the name of Mygazines is promising just that.
The way in which the website functions is quite user friendly. But even more important to note is that Mygazines’s idea of freely publishing any weekly/monthly/quarterly, irrespective of the source, will resonate with people. Simply put, the consumer space is driving in the direction of a mostly pulp-less new paradigm. And if you want to see where things are headed, Mygazines is perhaps the most overt example to date.
After all, subscriptions will either be acceptably inexpensive for the reader to consume, with, say, more than 9/10 lopped off the average annual mailer fee, or they will be entirely without cost to the reader other than time and the amount given for particular electronic device. Looking at what the daily news business is having to struggle with today (from subscriptions to ad-supported websites), it’s safe to say that the latter option will be the likely scenario to emerge - albeit with a select few holdouts dotting the landscape that manage to make do with reader contributions.
The delivery mechanism is the reason this movement toward free, of course. That and the fact that information today doesn’t play well with barriers. (Media in music and video form, as well as long-form books and perhaps some pre-eminent journals here and there, are an exception in my mind, because there’s really no easy way to maintain an appreciable experience and survive on a advert-content ratio of 50/50 or worse. Music and ads can be taken together sometimes. But all the time? That I strongly doubt. The same for some video productions. And things like The New Yorker and The Virginia Quarterly Review.) For the most part, the dead-paper publishing industry long imagined to be on an interminable course no longer seems to have the wherewithal to go much further. The tangible representations of the vast majority of newspapers and magazines are slated for fairly swift elimination. That’s the reality of it. Wireless, handheld technologies are only further goading the grim reaper at this point.
Mygazines doesn’t. Sure, it will most likely have to contend with takedown notices and threats of legal action and possible destruction. (Unless it can do things like YouTube and pin any unsavory blame on its users’ uploads.) But the way it works is free. People like free. Which means that, if anything, an actor like Zinio will look more like Mygazines than the reverse in relatively short order.