Mygazines: Where 21st century piracy meets 19th century publishing medium

With a new Web site called Mygazines, you can scan in your favorite periodical and share it with the world. That’s a lot of work for something that is terrible to read on a computer screen.

Are publishers grateful for these extra eyes on their content and advertising? I guess not.

No, I don’t get the “convenience” of being able to read a print publication on my computer screen, especially when many Web technologies exist that allow you to do this more easily. MP3s, music, movies and software certainly lend themselves to piracy; I don’t think magazines do. I can’t think of a publication that I would like to spend time scanning. Plus, many of these magazines are already online for free!

But wouldn’t that be … awesome?

Some commenters on the Mashable article like the concept. One remarked that you could assemble articles from various sources into a single, uber magazine. This experience is something I think you could do more easily (and legally) via RSS feeds, blogs, news aggregators and the like. On your mobile, Google’s site for cell phones provides an excellent RSS reader, and there are various iPhone apps that also pull this off.

Another commenter thinks this site is the magazine industry’s Napster-like wake-up call. Uh, that wake-up call came nearly 18 years ago when the Web really took off. Newspapers and magazines alike have tried to put up pay walls on their sites and have failed miserably. The mainstream media’s problems are well documented, and I don’t need to elaborate on them ad nausam.

Go free

What does this mean for publishers? It’s just a repeat of something they should already know: you cannot control your information on the Internet. Information wants to be free, and there’s little you can do about it.

Free is not the future; it is now. Says “Free” author and Wired editor Chris Anderson:

Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, and a swarm of other bands on MySpace that grasped the audience-building merits of zero. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

Anderson goes on to outline how smart business people can make money off of “free.” Clever publication leaders should take note.

If publishers wanted to get ahead — well, at this point “even” — with the game, they would create a Mygazine-like service themselves and do it better. Make it more stable. Heck, they have access to the PDFs and raw files already. They should also drop Zinio and monetize it themselves. Make this service available for free on Kindle, and create iPhone and Android apps. This alone could boast sagging subscription rates and bring more eyes to grateful advertisers.

(And don’t just post your PDFs online. That’s lame and not in the most usable form.)

As we know, a publication’s subscription rate usually goes to the costs of getting it to you via snail mail. (There are exceptions, of course, like journals that survive on subscription dollars, rather than ad money, to deliver content.) Electronic distribution is nearly costless and gets valuable content into more hands.

Would dead-tree subscriptions fall? They already are. Look at this as a way to boost them in the short term. An aging audience is *gulp* dying off and the younger one that is replacing it is turning less and less to print products for information. People who like getting a magazine every week will probably stick to it because that’s the medium they most enjoy perusing. Those people aren’t going to go to these extra services. I think online and print audiences for some publications are different beasts, different demographics.

I won’t use Mygazines, but its arrival shows there’s some sort of demand. Are magazine publishers listening?