How the printed mag is now under threat

The threat to print is coming from all sides and this morning's Independent will not allay the fears.

It is the magazine sector that is now under attack as the paper asks

Yet do we really need to carry our favourite mag around with us at all? Asda suspects not, having adopted the idea of a digital newsagent, which might be among the gravest threats to print media yet.

The system will work as follows

consumers pay a fixed monthly subscription for a magazine which is then downloaded on to their PC. Unlike a website, which has a loading front page that directs users to different links, this scheme aims to recreate digitally the shape of a magazine, with pages arranged in sequence to induce a "click and flick user interface".

The system has a number of advantages over traditional models.The most important being flexibility

Regular readers of a particular publication can choose to buy a month's subscription to their favoured title but for a generation that has grown up with the luxury of free content from a plethora of different providers, there is an opt-out from that rigidity.