Well, you might think that the e-ink cover clad magazine Esquire is publishing next month was radical innovation enough for a long time in the publishing industry… Apparently not. Two very interesting pieces of news (or rather signposts) I predict will cause quite a stir in the publishing business, just popped up in my feed reader.

1. The innovative and razor blade sharp Derek Powazek (mastermind behind Fray, JPGmag, Pixish etc.) has been consulting a HP Labs project called MagCloud.

“MagCloud is an HP Labs research project evaluating new web services that will provide small independent magazine publishers, online content owners, and small businesses the ability to custom publish digitized magazines and economically print and fulfill on demand.”

The project’s ambition is to make magazine publishing just as easy as taking a photo copy. You just upload a pdf and they take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management etc. The idea is to create the opportunity for everyone to be a magazine publisher, because you can actually make money from it:

“It costs you nothing to publish a magazine on MagCloud. To buy a magazine costs 20¢ per page, plus shipping. For example, a 20-page magazine would be four bucks plus shipping. And you can make money! You set your issue price and all proceeds above the base price go to you.”

There’s a world of possibilities here and best of  all is that the print-on-demand concept helps the environment, according to Powazek:

“Did you know the average sell-through rate for a magazine is about 30%? The sell-through rate is the rate which a given issue of a magazine will sell from a store. That means 70% of all printed magazines are just stopping by the newsstand on their way to the garbage dump or recycling center. All that time, work, and energy, just to make trash.”

A couple a years ago I co-organized a conference on new media where Derek did a great talk about community created content. I remember he said: “Magazines are the new websites.” An opinion I share, and wrote a blogpost about at unwired.dk some while ago (in Danish). For more in-depth information about this, here’s a nice interview with Powazek sharing his thoughts on the project.

2. The other signpost is also dealing with the magazine business. This project, however, delivers an ad hominem attack on the entire business model in the industry. The courageous and foolhardy guys behind Piratebay.org have just opened Mygazines.com. Where the concept behind MagCloud is to produce magazines this concept is more about consuming – for free. It’s really quite simple: download and read all the magazine you want for free. Someone’s scanning some of the most popular magazines in the world page to page, and upload them to our pleasure.

I think it’s safe to say that this will pi** of the entire industry big time.

However, I think there are some really nice innovative features, some of which I’ve actually missed without knowing. The reason why it’s called Mygazines is that you can go shop for content across all the different magazines. That means you can build your own golf magazine consisting of faved articles and news syndicated from all the magazines. Or how about making your own collection of recipes based on 10 different kinds of food zines? Sounds great, right?

Of course it’s illegal. But just as I think pirated music is a symptom of some unfulfilled digital needs, I think the same thing goes for Mygazines. How come no one at Condé Nast Publications, News Corp. or Hubert Burda Media has made a joint venture project – a world-class magazine portal where we can pick and choose content from all magazines? The craving for personalized and customized products is tremendous and the one-size-fits-all model is a dinosaur. These projects show some future directions of the publishing industry.