I loved and coveted magazines as a kid. I occasionally got a subscription to something as a birthday or Christmas gift, but my favorite magazines were the ones my father would occasionally splurge on: Scientific American and The Economist. The four of us kids mostly wore ill-fitting corduroys and out-of-fashion sweaters from a church charity, but my folks never scrimped on music lessons or education.
Now, strangely, I don't really read magazines. As an adult, now I have to figure what to do with all the magazines that pile up unread on top of the issue from 3 months ago that I "keep meaning to get to". In addition, my interest in hobbies waxes and wanes. The hobbies remain consistent, but I often will put them away for a year or several, and come back to them later. This doesn't fit in with a 3 year subscription to Popular Mechanics.
All this is just to set the stage for Maghound, currently in beta. The service lets you subscribe to the magazines of your choice, but with a twist -- you can change your choices at a moment's notice. It's winter and you've put away your camera to start cooking for the holidays? Switch out "Popular Photography" for "Cooking Light" or "Food & Wine" instead. Switch back in spring, or try something different.
Once the magazines arrive, you own them for good; this isn't a service like Netflix, where you send them back. Maghound doesn't quite fit the PSS as I've defined it, since it still results in magazines cluttering up your house rather than being shared around, but the fact that it offers such responsiveness in choice and the way in which it drastically lowers the switching cost means that people can demand only the publications that they are interested in. It will cut down on the situation where people subscribe to a magazine, lose interest after a while, but still receive them -- a waste of resources and energy. Or worse -- where they try to cancel and then somehow, because they are no match for the salesperson on the other end of the line, end up extending the subscription for 2 years.
With Maghound, you can switch your choices at any time, and for magazines that don't publish monthly, you can select "substitute" publications for months when your first choice mag isn't available. Modern persons who spend time on the Internets have come to enjoy and expect the convenience of being able to manage one's own queue of content, whether it's the Netflix queue, podcasts, blog readers, or magazines.
The cost is 3 magazine titles for $4.95 per month, 5 magazine titles for $7.95 per month, or 7 magazine titles for $9.95 per month. Each additional title beyond 7 is $1 more per month, up to 15 titles.
They are currently running a 30 day free trial, and I don't see any annual fees listed anywhere.
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