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Aug 15 2008 9:37AM EDT

The Magazine's Industry's Last, Best Hope?

Over on the Portfolio.com mainland today, I've got a piece about Maghound, a clever new magazine sales service created by Time Inc. but catering to all publishers. The easy (if not entirely accurate) shorthand is Netflix for magazines: A consumer signs up to receive a given number of titles per month but can change which titles he receives as often as he likes.

I remember having lunch with an executive at another big publisher back in 2006 and wondering aloud why nobody had yet tried something like this. Little did I know that Time had already been working up the Maghound concept for two years by that point.

I think the idea has promise. It might not be the answer to all of the industry's increasingly acute circulation woes, but it's the sort of thinking print companies need to be doing more of.

One question I neglected to address in the feature is the matter of content previews. A service like Maghound works best if it can give customers a sneak peek of what's in next month's issues. That feature won't be available at launch, but will be part of future releases, says Maghound president Dave Ventresca.

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