Keep It
Louis Borders started a successful bookstore chain (Borders) and a spectacular Internet failure (Webvan). Now he's getting a lot of press coverage for his latest venture, something called KeepMedia, an online "digital newsstand" where you can read old magazine articles for a fee. He's got about 140 magazines in his database. There are about 3,000 magazine titles published. He's got very few newspapers. And you can't access stories from the latest editions of the magazines unless you're already a paid subscriber to the version that's printed in thin slices of dead trees

Yet Louis Borders' KeepMedia is being covered heavily, with journalists wondering if he can succeed in selling digital content via the Internet, where many people think things like that ought to be free.

I have one question.

Why would you pay KeepMedia for access to a mere 140 publications when you could pay a small fee for Intellisearch, a service from a little-known company called NetContent a reasonable fee for access to a few thousand publications - including magazines, newspapers and trade and academic journals from the ABA Journal to the Yale Law Journal - and get access to their latest content even if you don't subscribe to the printed version.

Keep it, Louis.