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Friday, August 01, 2003
Keep Media is a Good Idea Whose Time Has Come
Louis Borders, the founder of the successful book retail chain Borders and the not-so-successful online grocer Webvan, has just launched a promising web-based venture that just might have legs. It's called KeepMedia, and it offers current and archived issues of popular U.S. magazines online.
Borders's newest venture is only a few days old, but already has more than 140 newspapers and magazines on board. If this takes off, I could see a brand new industry sprouting that could bode very well for content producers. It's about time all that great content come available online.
Now if we could just get major search engines in on the act, we'd really have something. Think about it: Digital content + search engines = a good thing. Borders observes that there are millions of pages of rich content stuck inside the pages of old magazines, and there's no reason that these pages shouldn't be generating revenue for the publishers who worked so hard to publish it.
On a related note, as we mentioned a few weeks ago, Amazon.com is already mulling the creation of a searchable, digital repository of thousands of books sold online. Do a search, find a match, buy the book. It makes sense, and it works for everyone.
I hope KeepMedia can do the same for magazines. Content producers deserve to make money, and it's time they cashed in.
Posted by
Cory Kleinschmidt
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