Surviving on freebies
Computers and Technology specific magazines like Digit, Chip and Skoar have become more or less irrelevant these days. Gone are the days when we used to wait eagerly for the magazine to arrive, as part of the monthly subscription, at the doorstep. Those were the days of dial-up connections and bandwidth capped broadband connections.
We needed these magazines for the Linux distributions and downloads that you couldn’t afford to download on your limiting internet connection. The magazine was and still probably is just a well bound booklet of advertisements with content conveniently placed in between, content that you might find useful once in a while. The reviews may not always be right, the 30 day/24 hour reviews always seemed to be manipulated content added to fill pages at the last moment but the products were usually well known enough for them to be highlighted on the cover page.
They always managed to look like well funded groups with a lot of products to review, but they never managed to maintain a quality standard you can still find on cnet and engadget. And with the evolution of web media, these magazines have become rather obsolete. The free stuff that they bundle with them shall always remain the most interesting bit, because you can Google the other stuff and find it before you flip the pages.
9.9Media has bought Digit and Skoar from Jasubhai and I doubt they can do anything to make them better. With the coming of RSS Feeds, I don’t think people really need to subscribe to any form of print. Time Magazine has a paid online subscription that a lot people I know have preferred to subscribe to because its cheaper and arrives before it gets printed.
Digit sucks. Same for Chip, which simply lives on as a ghost of Digit (Jasubhai Digital earlier made Chip before launching their own mag). PC World, however, does GOOD reviews. You can SEE they are less biased than Digit’s.
I used to like Digit…Arnd 1 year ago when I was into reading…?
@Ankur: Maybe so, still doesn’t seem worth the money. Tell me one thing about PC World that makes it worth buying.
@Siddharth: College cannot be so taxing. Come on, be reasonable and do something about it.
Well Digit is pretty bad now, in terms of both content and customer service. I didnt receive one of my copies and had to write them 20 emails with no response, called them, no response, finally i used the change in address form to get attention. They dont even read their customer care emails.
@Tikna: The transition to 9.9Media has done them more harm I think. I’m surprised you of all people still subscribe to Digit.
Well they were giving a free DVD writer, that tempted me
, but cant help that one bad decision 
@Tikna: Yeah, I’ve seen those ads. But isn’t a DVD Writer dirt cheap these days?
I got the subscription in 2006 end, at that time i didnt have one so i went for it, they also gave a 512MB pen drive, too tempting to resist !
@Tikna: 512MB pen drive in 2006 awesome. Not worth as much these days though.