The Internet can enable us to enjoy periodicals' benefits without their limitations.

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Up to now, we’ve had to put up with periodicals’ drawbacks if we wanted to avail ourselves of their unique advantages.   But in the Internet age, this tradeoff is no longer necessary.  Periodicals just need to be better adapted to an online environment.

Virtually all major magazines now have online editions, but these have tended to copy the paper format too closely to take effective advantage of the online medium.  

Most significantly, they persist in following the issue-at-a-time presentation format, with all its needless discarding of still-pertinent content. 

If you want more than the "current" material, you’ll have to seek it out in online archives that have no more appeal than an old-fashioned library’s mustiest stacks--typically via clumsy low-level search engines that can do no more than the most mindless text matching.  As an example of how this goes, I was once intrigued to see on a screen that my ancestor Henrietta Cotta was mentioned in an early-1900s article in the Washington Post.  When I looked up the content in question, it was actually an ad for draperies, for which one of the available colors was terra cotta. 

Other periodicals won’t let you read older material at all, unless you pay them an upfront fee.

It’s time for online magazines to stop copying their print editions so slavishly.   In a purely rational sense, current editions are nothing more than what computer database experts call “views”--i.e., ways of looking at the data, rather than the data itself. 

The real content of periodicals is cumulative.  Online magazines need to start presenting it in a way that reflects this.

© COPYRIGHT 2004 ROBERT WINTER.  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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More Specifics

	Making their cumulative content more conveniently accessible to users is in magazines' economic interests.
	An upcoming consolidated service will make online magazine articles easier to find.