Magtastic Blogsplosion

A new magazine-based file-sharing website called Mygazines has just launched, flagrantly breaking publishers’ copyright from around the world. Is it a threat, an opportunity or both?

Let’s step back a moment. When Amazon released the Kindle, most people focused on the experience of using physical object, saying how they did or didn’t want to read a book on it, how it was or wasn’t the same as paper, and so on.

What most people overlooked, however, was that Amazon was testing something else at the same time, something probably even more important than being an early seller of commercial e-paper: they were testing a sales model for digital publishing.

The music industry was painfully caught out by the arrival of MP3 players and iPods; by the time Lord Steve of Jobs had finally persuaded most big record labels not to shun digital, millions of their former customers had already turned to illegal file-sharing and copying as the only way to make their music digitally compatible. And hey, once you’ve gone free, why go back?

The music, film and TV industries have already had to change their business strategies to cope with file sharers. And now it’s the turn of books and magazines.

Publishers have apparently been consulting their lawyers over Mygazines, a website dedicated to a community that shares scans of their favourite mags. The site is pretty easy to use, is mostly filled with not-very-good scans, and is a little cryptically located - apparently owned by a Mr John Smith, its address is a PO Box in the Bahamas.

In its launch press release, Mygazines describes sharing magazines via its website as nothing more than picking up mags in “a doctors’ office, law firm, libraries, and hair salons”. It also claims that this is also more environmentally friendly than print, that it eliminates the unfair advantages of conglomerates, and allows users only to see the content “that is of interest to them”.

The press release ends by saying “www.mygazines.com has full intentions to work with the industry, with the aim of fortifying the future of all those either directly or indirectly supported by the production, sales and distribution of magazines.”

Much of that feels disingenuous. Even Napster didn’t claim that sharing music online was just the same as someone driving past you with their radio on. No trees are saved by scanning in a magazine that’s already been printed. There are big problems with the mechanics of physical magazine distribution, but scanning magazines and putting them online won’t change the domination of the big boys - if anything, it’ll consolidate it. And as for “only content that interests users” - like a Tivo to a TV channel, there goes the advertising model. That’s the real reason for publishers to reach for the red legal telephone (after all, giving away magazines for free has never been a problem in the States, as long as the ads are in place).

Mygazines’ intentions to “work with the industry” could be read in one of several different ways. Perhaps it intends a profit-share on ads on the site. Perhaps it will offer branded “channels” like YouTube. Maybe it’s hoping to be taken over by a big publisher. Or it could be hedging its bets between all that and more, building the tech with no clear business model in mind beyond knowing that there’s money in magazines, and hoping that its share will come in from somewhere.

Whether or not the lawyers will shut down this particular Caribbean venture isn’t yet clear. In fact it doesn’t really matter. The situation right now is

a) people generally don’t want to read full magazines online, (though they might read a particular article if it isn’t New Yorker length)

b) with technology, that will change

Reliable, high quality e-paper isn’t here yet, but it’s on its way. What will this mean? Perhaps an increase in product placement – scanning in articles won’t harm that. Maybe, just maybe it’ll also mean that some of the naysayers in the magazine industry will adopt a digital strategy. Compared to newspapers, the vast majority of big magazines are currently being shown up as hopelessly inept at archiving content online, at using digital formats, at providing advertisers with digital solutions or in expanding their brands online. This is an industry wake-up call, and the lawyers won’t save you for long. Either you make your print magazines so special that no kind of e-paper can replace the physical sensation of reading them - or you try to adapt, and quickly, to the digital age before Colour Kindle 3.0 is unleashed. Mygazines is a warning, and not before time.

As for the low quality of scans on Mygazines, as this kind of thing gets bigger, don’t think that your own staff won’t start uploading PDFs to the site before your mag goes to print, possibly for a share of the online ad profits. The time to start embedding your PDFs with invisible digital watermarks is now…

Oh and publishing lawyers: when you’ve finished with Mygazines, you might want to have a go at these:

Books4Share, Magazine Share, E-book Magazine Download, Dleex, and, of course, a thousand and more magazine bittorrents.

Is that the sound of the tide coming in?

(For more, read the discussion at Mashable)