October 10th, 2011
From a press release that went out at 9 a.m. EDT today:
Amazon.com today announced that customers can now manage all of their print magazine subscriptions in one place, no matter where they were originally purchased.Using the Amazon Print Magazine Subscription Manager (www.amazon.com/subscriptionmanager), customers can easily make changes to their address, cancel, renew, track expiration dates, or report a problem for all their magazine subscriptions. These features have been available for subscriptions purchased on Amazon.com since 2009 and are now available for all print magazines, regardless of where they were purchased.
It continues:
With Amazon Magazines, customers enjoy everyday low prices on more than 40,000 magazine titles, hassle-free renewals, free shipping on all magazines and the ability to cancel at any time for a refund on all unshipped issues.
And the thing is, it actually works. It put my kind-of-obscure magazine titles, The Believer, Communications of the ACM and Creative Non-Fiction, into the engine and there they were.
Amazon continues to Amaze. And, at the same time, to frighten, as oligopolies generally do.