Articles | The Future of Magazine Subscriptions

The print industry has been dying a slow death over the past few years. Books, magazines, newspapers - virtually all part of the publishing world is in one form or another under siege from the fast march of the modern world. Newspaper circulations are down, magazine subscriptions are drying up, and book print runs are getting smaller; all due to technology eating up a sizable portion of the print industry's audience. There's a song that goes "video killed the radio star." Well, in these times, it's appropriate to say that "internet killed the print industry."

The biggest thing going against print is that its content is not easily accessible. One has to go to a newsstand or wait for their monthly subscription to arrive by mail before one can read any of the content offered by print media such as newspapers and magazines. With the advent of the internet, all these have been made superfluous. Readers can now consume any content they like at any time they want.

The reading public is not shrinking - in fact, there are more people reading now than in the last decade. Internet activity has exploded in epic proportions since the 2000s. A large part of internet activity still entails reading. Browsing the internet is making readers out of more and more people. So how can print tap into this large market of internet readers?

Enter the digital publishing solution. With digital publishing, print media such as newspapers and magazines can arrest their rapid fall into oblivion and steer their dying medium into breathable life. Newspaper and digital magazine subscriptions present a real chance for print media to survive the onslaught of the internet.

By pushing their content into digital format, newspapers, magazines, and books allow the consuming public to access their content easily. There's no long trip to a newsstand or a long wait for the mailman to arrive. All one needs to do is pay the subscription or the cover price and then download the content one desires. This easy access for content allows print media to fight on equal footing with internet mainstays such as blogs and niche websites, which are the culprits killing print media.

The success of e-readers such as iPad, Nook, and Kindle mean there's a bright future for digital publications. Publishing companies that are able to recognize this know that offering digital versions of newspaper and magazine subscriptions to the public is the way out of a sure and certain painful death. Digital is the way to go, and in the next couple of years this will become even more obvious as more and more people start to own e-readers and start consuming content digitally.

The last great barrier to digital consumption was the computer screen being uncomfortable to reading eyes. Sitting in front of the PC for long hours was not an activity considered leisurely. All that changed with the arrival of e-readers. Suddenly, readers can take their content anywhere, read at ease, and never have to sit in front of an unwieldy, painfully bright PC again. The future of print is here, and it's telling you that its evolution is underway