Magazines and other periodicals are ripe for electronic transformation because of the inefficiencies inherent in the way they distribite information.

For starters, consider the mismatch between the time when information is offered and actual public demand for the material.  Say a car magazine runs an evaluation of a particular model, or a women's magazine carries a guide to communicating in relationships.   Is public interest in either of these topics limited to just one month? That's all the time the articles will effectively be available to the public, though, since the magazines that contain them will vanish from the newsstands as soon as their next editions appear. 

Why should publishers pay to create a product, and then effectively take it off the market when there are still lots of people out there who want it?

An intelligently designed electronic “magazine” needn’t remove all its articles from public availability every time a new issue comes out. What's new each month can simply be what database designers call a "view"--i.e., just a selective glimpse of what's available, rather than the totality of what's available.

In a more adaptive online successor to the magazine, material from prior issues can not only be retained in a manner that is highly accessible, it can also be electronically “interwoven” with related material from both internal and external sources.  What  results will far surpass the tedious process of rummaging through "back issues" that some existing magazines currently provide in their online versions.

In the evolving electronic medium, the issue of who gets to do the interweaving and re-combining of material is particularly interesting. On the Internet, the basic underlying paradigm is that you don’t have to own material to link to it.   In effect, this means that the same article—or section of an article—could legally be “included” in any number of different online “collections” at the same time.

If carried to its logical conclusion, this principle could enable a lot more people to serve the functional roles of editors and publishers than with print formats. All anyone would really need to get into the action is an ability to match material to the tastes of a particular audience.