Hacks and print vs. online and geekiness
April 26, 2008
In one of the magazines I get (yes, it’s Popular Science again, but I’ll talk about something fresh and new in a blog post on Monday or Tuesday) there’s a section called How 2.0.
The section shows you HOW – imagine that – to do geeky little things to your gadgets and other belongings.
In the print version of Popular Science, they recently showed how to hack your Eee PC so it will run the Apple Macintosh OSX Leopard operating system. They also tell how to up the RAM to 2GB and how to install Bluetooth.
It’s all very cool and very geeky, but what is more amazing to me is that I’m paying buckets of money to get the print version of the publication and this hack appeared in DECEMBER online.
Now if I have to wait four months to get info that’s been available to clickers and twitterers and Internet surfers, how am I going to react when Pop-Sci asks me to renew my subscription? That’s just another instance where customer service and/or complete disconnection from the consumer is driving buyers away from what was once a great product.
I hope that magazines realize that their bread is buttered with paper and newsprint. And until they can make an online subscription model work, they better pay attention to the readers who deal with physical paper cuts.
Otherwise they’ll virtually be out of business.
More to come…
