More Mygazines

The Press Gazette has more about the Mygazines site and its possible business model. They reproduce a lengthy but empty email from the creator of the web site, supposedly 'John Smith', but that may well be an alias for whoever has built the service. Here is an extract from John Smith's email:

The true future of the industry lies in the final stages of our site concept. We can easily transition to the final revenue model quickly with the co-operation of the publishers. We cannot however reveal the full concept at this time as we are saving that discussion for the publishing industry directly.........
As per our press release: We have every intention of working with the industry to provide not only revenue streams that are vast, but also an answer for the Publishers in general. Our method will increase current revenue, halt and reverse advertising revenue lost to the internet, and overcome the lack of the ability for magazines to stay current.

There is more in that bombastic and questionable tone.

There was something fishy about the Mygazines claim that these magazines (hundreds of complete magazines) were being uploaded by end users who aimed to share 'their' magazines with others. One tell-tale sign, most of the magazines were uploaded in their entirety with Contents Pages clearly identified. If a magazine sharing site, built by the community, was for real it would be chock full of magazines which had been partially uploaded or badly annotated in the upload process. Mygazines content looked far too perfect. Much more probable that it was the work of one or two bodies toiling away with a guilotine and feeding the scanned results into the database system that lies at the heart of the service. There is no 'safe harbor/user generated content' defence for doing that.

It all looks like a shameless and pointless ripoff operation, with no under-lying business proposition which could possibly appeal to publishers. What a pity that the ingenuity and effort that has been put into building this 'service' was not applied to a more worthwhile and sensible project.