The end of news agents

A systems specialist who works in Valletta blogs at Pangs of Irreality. In this piece, the writer discusses the advantages of online magazines:

I used to love browsing magazine displays, such as one might find at the Luqa International Airport, and I must have spent literally hours of my life comparing different issues before buying that all important weekly fix of (mostly computer- or Sci Fi-related) reading material.

Financial constraints - read as the house mortgage and a not-marginal increase in the cost of living - meant that the number of magazines I bought started to decrease, at first very gradually, down to a couple of publications which I used to considered as ‘essential’. Today I can fairly say that I haven’t bought a magazine in months. But do I miss buying all those glossy numbers?

Yesterday we happened to go to Bay Street for the evening. Such an outing will always invariably involve a trip to Chaucer’s, the establishment’s own answer to an Island dominated by Agenda Bookshops. And of course, after perusing the collection of books available for sale, I eventually drifted to the magazine section.

And as I looked at the various titles on offer, it occurred to me that I would be crazy to buy any more magazines, for the simple reason that most of it was already available to me, online and (mostly) free! Indeed, the online content is even more valuable because the very nature of a magazine means that any information it may contain is probably outdated anyway!

So yes, a magazine may be more practical to carry around than a laptop. But then again I do not think that, as long as information and content is freely available on the net, I will ever need to buy another one.