Thursday, November 17, 2011

Kindle Fire Newsstand

I haven't had paper magazine subscription for couple years but now I got this new media consuming device so I wanted to try how it works in digital era. I subscribed to two trials of cooking magazines cause it seems like most practical things I might use.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="470" caption="Kindle Fire Newsstand"]Kindle Fire Newsstand[/caption]

Selection was quite limited so my favorite Cuisine At Home was not available. I chose  Bon Apetit and Everyday Food. First impression is that they look quite like real versions. But there is a catch, all this pretty photos take a lot of space and on digital reader space is limited so I hope that there is a way to store everything in Amazon Cloud otherwise if I got couple subscriptions I will run out of space pretty soon. Second, I do like that half of the pages are ads. Did not I paid for subscription? Why I have to still download all this commercial payload? In traditional newspaper model for years people tolerated this double dipping model cause it did not cost them money. When you got newspaper which 20% is actual content you most likely discard unwanted ad pages. You cannot do that with digital file. First it is in one piece, second, it is DRM protected. In result you got crippled product and you have to pay for storage or bandwith. I think publishers need to change their distribution model if they want to be success in digital age. Right now they just repackage their current junk and hope people will buy it as they used to.

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