3032 The magazine industry, already beleaguered by declining newsstand sales and lower advertising revenues, is faced with a new challenge - Internet magazine-sharing, and publishing execs must be apprehensive that their business could be about to be revolutionized in a way anologically similar to the way the music file-sharing phenomenon launched by Hotline and Napster around the turn of the Century did the recorded music industry.

A new startup Website called Mygazines.com is inviting users copy and upload current editions of popular magazines that can be downloaded for free. This is of course in violation of U.S. and Canadian copyright laws, but Mygazine's domain name is registered in Anguilla, which is a British overseas territory, in the Caribbean, and beyond the reach of U.S copyright enforcers.

While copyright holders could sue Mygazines in U.S. courts because the site's content is available to Americans, the courts would have New & Notable legal leverage to oblige Mygazines representatives to show up or to collect any damages awarded with the company in absentia.

Mygazines invites users (the site already claims some 16,000 registered users as of last Friday to "Easily upload your magazine, catalogue, brochure or any other publication to our site for free. Your document will be converted by our system into an interactive publication allowing users from all over the world to read, comment, share and archive articles from your publication until the end of time!"

"Why should I upload my publication to mygazines.com?" the Mygazines asks rhetorically. providing the following list of reasons:

• Our article-level search and archiving ability allows your audience to find the content they're looking for faster
• Increase your distribution and advertising revenue by exposing your publication to more eyes
• Keep control of your publication: Mygazines will not allow for downloading or printing of your publication. Your original source file is never accessible.
• Save the trees - no paper will be used in the making of your virtual publication  
• It's absolutely free!

The Mygazines site offers three types of content:

• Magazines
These are the uploaded magazines in whole.

• Articles
Every magazine has many articles – instead of having to sift through your magazines to find what you’re looking for, you can search the articles directly. Looking for a pie recipe? No need to search through entire food magazines – just search for recipes of your favorite pie in the search bar at the top of every page.

• Mygazines
So what are you to do with all these articles you like? Why not archive them into your own personal magazines, or, "mygazines": a collection of articles arranged just the way you like them. Each of your mygazines can be focused on an area of interest - you could setup "recipes" mygazines and store all those pie recipes you found. Redecorating your bedroom? Create "bedrooms" mygazines and store all the articles you find on bedroom décor. You can create as many mygazines as you like and store as many or as few articles in each as you like. The possibilities are endless.

Indeed - it is a seductively attractive concept for those of us who like to read.

The British journalism trade news site PressGazette's Rachael Gallagher reports that the principal behind Mygazines, who goes by the conveniently generic name of "John Smith" in a letter emailed to the site, denying that he's a pirate and declaring: “We have every intention of working with the industry to provide not only revenue streams that are vast, but also an answer for the publishers in general. Our method will increase current revenue, halt and reverse advertising revenue lost to the internet, and overcome the lack of the ability for magazines to stay current.”

Smith didn't deny that he's infringing copyright, but argued that that his critics are “completely missing our inactive revenue model”.

My observation is that whatever happens on the legal front with Mygazines, it offers a preview of the future of publishing. I love hard copy magazines and currently subscribe to four of them, but they all now offer expanded content on the Internet in addition to what appears in the traditional ink-on-paper medium. If (when?) hard copy magazines ever disappear from the scene, they will be profoundly missed by me. I vastly prefer reading for pleasure with a book or magazine in my hand, and without the encumbrances of electronic devices and communication connections. I can't conceive of an electronic e-book reader ever coming close to the tactile satisfaction of the printed page.

However, to be pragmatically realistic, I don't suppose that magazine publishers will ultimately have greater success in blocking dissemination of their product over the Internet than big musicbiz has with theirs, and any legal rear-guard victories they may achieve will be as Pyrrhic.

Charles W. Moore

Tags: Blogs ï Commentary ï

Login † or † Register † †