Hacker News Reader

Comment by DennisP | Hacker News Reader

I subscribe to a major newspaper. But I'm not going to subscribe to all major newspapers. The individual subscription model doesn't really fit a world where you can go to one site, and click links to articles from lots of different publications.

If they had a common subscription, where you pay one reasonable fee and they divide it up according to whose articles you read, I'd subscribe to that. Since they don't, I subscribe to one paper and do workarounds on the others. I feel this is ethical because if everyone did it, with a decently random distribution, then the newspapers would survive just fine. They'd make the same overall revenue as when everyone had one newspaper, showing up at their doorstep each morning.

View on HN

There is a common subscription mostly overlooked. Your local library.

What most of the press subscription services make the mistake of is trying to simplify the billing process to the individual. Ripe opportunity for someone to come along and make an all in one paid subscription service at the county level and make it easy to log into all sites with your library membership.

The current one is per site model is way too much from too not be worth it.

> If they had a common subscription, where you pay one reasonable fee and they divide it up according to whose articles you read

So some extent that's what Apple News+ (included in Apple One) is. But it doesn't do multi region stuff I don't think, and misses some major publications.

Syndication used to be the way this idea worked. You'd buy your local paper that wrote about the cat stuck in the tree down the street, but it also republished national articles from AP. If you really cared about another locale, you might subscribe to two papers, which meant you might see the same national article twice.

That is basically the Apple News model. If you have Apple News (part of the Apple One bundle) you can get articles from a number of publishers that would normally require a separate prescription. I’m not sure if the publishers really like this model but so far they seem to be willing to play along.

This is also quickly happening with social media now.

Twitter $8, FB $12 (web) / $15 ios)

You're asking for the cable tv model where they aggregate premium channels, imho that doesn't work either... you end up paying for a lot of stuff that you're not interested in.

How about getting a paid membership for certain higher education institutions’ libraries, which will give you access to not only books, but also a plethora of periodicals. And that will be fully legal and ethical.

Do you have examples of institutions that do this? A Google search only returned subscriptions to access research papers but not books or periodicals.

Will a library membership remove the hassle when I click a link from reddit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com