1998

3,000,000 / 60 years of adulthood = 50,000 per year. Not a problem outside costal cities.

Newspapers had a local monopoly on publishing to their circulation. If you want to communicate with 100,000+ people in your city tomorrow you had to pay. News, sports, comics, the content is bait to drive the circulation.

Digital publishing broke the monopoly and eroded the profits. In my opinion, newspapers that already had to deal with real competition before the internet have been much more successful: NYC and London papers.

Now there are basically two kinds of news content: factual information that is cheap and not profitable because it is a commodity, and propaganda that is supported by the beneficiary.

The single thing that bothers me most about goodreads is that they’re owned by a bookseller, the have a list of 200 books I’ve read, and every month they email me promoting romance novels, bestsellers and books about america culture. The one I just checked includes an advertisement for dresses (I’m male) If they would literally just list new releases by authors I’ve read it would be 100% more useful.

I’ve used one of their mobile apps to overlay a hiking map on the satellite map and (iirc) cache the tiles in the area. Very useful to have gps positioning on a map that may only be available on paper, pdf, etc.