Marco Arment has sold yet another of his projects. The man who created Instapaper and co-founded Tumblr has just announced the sale of his (originally) iOS only magazine The Magazine to the editor of said magazine. Magazine.

For those that have not heard of The Magazine, you should check it out. I was very excited when Arment announced the project, and subscribed on the first day. But I realised a while ago that what I was excited about was the project itself rather than actually reading the thing.

Arment's plan was to make a native magazine on iOS. Unlike the bloated digital versions of real physical world periodicals, The Magazine was conceived as an app - the focus was on simplicity. He envisioned a clean interface that would download quickly, using little of your device's precious memory. It would be cheap (£1.49 per month) and regular (an issue every two-weeks). The reader would not be overloaded with content (I'm looking at you, The Economist), with each issue containing only around 5 medium-length articles. Each writer would be paid real money, and would be paid in advance.

This, I think, is an exciting prospect. This is what I want from digital publishing. It was a genuine re-imagining of what it means to produce written work and make that work available in a sustainable and cost-effective way. And people seemed to like it. He quickly had 10,000 subscribers - his "this is worth-while" number - and was a popular enough product that it has already spawned some (uncomfortably similar) clones.

That all said, I think I'm going to unsubscribe.

It is a great idea, and has been fantastically implemented. But it doesn't 'solve' the problem that really faces magazines and newspapers. And that problem is that most people simply aren't interested in 100% of the content of a magazine, and in the day and age of writing on the web they are unwilling to pay for something they may only read 50%, 20%, 10% of (still looking at you, The Economist) when they can get individual articles by writers they know they like for free online.