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Fight Clutter, Read More Web Content!Jun 13 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Magazine Subscriptions
The Bottom Line Read your websites! It reduces clutter, saves paper and money, and you earn everyone here a penny a hit. =)
With us being in this vaunted "digital age" we should be less and less reliant on trees and paper. But what I'm finding now is that in addition to reading the website versions of magazine, people insist on buying the paper version as well. This is wasteful for many reasons. First off, globally, we're actually using more paper now than we were during the non-digital age. I bet you're not recycling any of those magazines you're buying, either. Second, it's a waste financially for the buyer. There are rarely occasions where the website has less content than the magazine does. For example, I bought a subscription to ESPN the Magazine that I don't intend to renew. All the information, and more is included on the links in the webpage. I don't need to read the same thing twice. Granted, if I'm ever going on a flight or something, I want a magazine, but that's practically the only reason I can think of keeping this subscription active. It's useless for me to be paying an extra $20/year, although I did get that nifty ESPN pullover. Third, it's wasteful for the magazine publisher. Often times, the producer of a content website may not view themselves as "big time" unless they can get a print magazine and get ads printed on the pages of it. The problem with that, is that very, very few websites have the content necessary to make that jump to print magazine. But many of them make it anyway, then they fail because they cannot support the operating costs of both print and internet, they fail, and now your content is all gone. (Although, this is a pretty real fear for the web content by itself, as well.) Let's look at some of the benefits of web magazines: Content is fresh If you're living in the digital media, you have to update quickly, or you're old news very, very quick. This is why I never bother reading Sports Illustrated anymmore...everything happened last month! With a website, everything's been updated that day, and I'm not reading about someone's take on what Philly needs to do in Game 3 to avoid losing when they've already lost Game 3 to the mighty Lakers. (Note to Philly fans: No team in the Finals with the current format down 2-1 has ever won.) No stupid subscription cards fall out of the website Don't you hate those things? What are there, like 50 in each magazine? They get all over the floor, and they just add to the clutter. Some sites have banner ads and pop-ups, but you never have to clean those up because you have a date coming over. Website never gets lost in the mail When I bought my subscription to PC Gamer, my first issue took forever to get to me. What's worse, it was the only one that ever came with a CD, despite the fact that I paid the CD price. When you just regularly check up on a website, you can either download demos from them, and you don't hvae to worry about the website getting routed to someone else's computer. Richer content When magazines start using electronic paper, and they can embed movies clips on each page, I might get a subscription again. But until then, I'm happy linking to and downloading audio, video, and nice high-res pictures and getting my information that way. Plus with the interactivity Flash, Shockwave and other plug-ins offer, the dag of the print magazine has passed. No losing the website If you ever forget where a website you read daily is, you can always look into a search engine. Lose a magazine, or have a friend borrow it, and you're SOL. That's an awful lot of plusses for the website. Aside from having something tangible and portable, there really isn't all that much that can be said for reading a magazine, tnat can't be said for reading the online version.. And besides...what other news is out there? You can learn everything you need just from reading Epinions. ;)  |
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by gaelkm
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