The Economist has an excellent article on the future of books. It’s written against the backdrop of the Google book project which sees the company digitising 3,000 books a day from one university library alone.
The article draws parallels with music and that the album had died in favor of the song – people can purchase and listen to what they want as opposed the a complete package. I think there are considerations here for magazines and newspapers where single articles may be more valuable to some readers than the whole printed product we know today.
Definitely – I’d much prefer online access to just the political articles I want to read from UK newspapers (as an example) rather than trying to remember to buy the Guardian Weekly. Happy to pay a subscription and avoid all the stuff I am not interested in.
Another example is US magazine CounterPunch.
Ken