In a time when magazine revenues are falling, subscription numbers for dead-tree editions are dwindling, and people are, in ever-increasing numbers, turning to the digital world for fulfillment of their reading needs, one does not have to look much further than the customer service experience I received this morning to understand why printed word will soon be relegated to the birdcage of history.

The backstory is that a couple years ago I subscribed to CPU Magazine, a publication of Sandhill Publishing. It’s a fairly entertaining magazine, marketed solely at computer enthusiasts. The kind of folks who mod their systems, drop tons of cash on new hardware, and who, as a group, are on the cuting edge of technology. You’d think a magazine like this would be forward-thinking in terms of how that content is delivered.

Fast forward a year, and I didn’t bother to renew it. While I do enjoy the content, actually carving the time out of my day to sit down and read a magazine is not something that happens easily. So, I generally browse it fairly quickly, pick out the one or two articles I’d like to see, read them, and hand it off to someone else.

The interesting thing is that while I didn’t pay them, they kept sending it to me. I’m guessing to keep the circulation number up for advertising purposes.

I got my latest issue in the mail yesterday and decided to scan it into PDF format for transfer over to the iPad. I’ve discovered that I will generally read something if I have it available on a mobile platform, as I’d rather read than play another round of Plants Vs. Zombies. Transferring to PDF was a bust, and I just said to hell with it and tossed it in the recycle bin. I’m not really a member of that sub group anymore since my transition to Apple hardware, so the magazine has lost a bit of it’s appeal to me. I decided to call up Sandhill and ask them if there was a way I could subscribe to a digital-only version of the magazine, since it’s still of a passing interest to me, and it would make for entertaining reading along with my new digital-only subscription to Wired. It would be worth $15 a year to me, and I figured since they already have an online PDF collection (accessible through their website), and since they ARE a tech publication, they must have something available to people like me who don’t want any more paper cluttering up the house.

My call was picked up on the third ring by a young lady, who answered with “Hello?”. I cannot even begin to tell you how much it annoys me when someone answers their business line with that. No identification, no real greeting, nothing to indicate that I’m on the phone with an actual business. It’s jarring, and throws me right out of whatever pleasant conversational mood I might be in. Once we got past that, it became clear in about 10 seconds that I was on the phone with someone who has no empowerment to keep a customer (or, in my case, to gain back a PAYING customer).

I explained that I wasn’t even sure I was paying for the subscription, and that I no longer wished to receive CPU magazine in a paper format, and was interested in reducing the number of printed magazine that come to my house. All I got out of that was “So, you no longer want it?”. I again explained that I was no longer interested in in a non-downloadable, non-PDF version, and was told ”OK, I’ll take care of it”.

Really? Wow. That’s just all kinds of useless. So, thanks Sandhill. Thanks for saving me a few bucks a year.

Compare and contrast to my subscription to Wired. I subscribed on my iPad. Every month, an alert pops up and tells me that my new edition is ready to download and view. I’ll grant you that Wired has the resources of a large corporation behind it, and that’s why we have a great app that handles all the behind-the-scenes nonsense. And that’s fine for a large corporation. Sandhill doesn’t seem like a very big media presence, so maybe I’m expecting too much?

Maybe, until you remember that they ALREADY have an online viewer for PDF versions of the magazine. Why can’t you just let me log into my account and download any issue I’m entitled to? And don’t give me a song and dance about piracy. I take your physical magazine (that I don’t pay for) and hand it off to someone who also doesn’t pay for it and has never bought it (so you can’t add them to your circulation numbers), who then either trashes it or hands it to a third person.

Your desire to control how your magazine is distributed is neither my concern, nor my problem.

You’re getting in the way of me giving you money for your product. You’re making it difficult for me to have your content (which, by the way, I can get on the web for free from hundreds of different sources) in the way that I want it.

Until companies learn that they don’t get to continue to make the rules in an age where information is no longer a scarcity, this kind of nonsense is going to continue. Companies that get it (the notion that consumers are, in fact, your customers, and have control of your financial future) and give it (the empowerment of those consumers to access the content they want, however and whenever they choose) will thrive while Big Media dinosaurs will eventually sink into the tar pits under the weight of the very chains they wrap around their content.