Recently Computer Shopper stopped printing but unlike PC Mag, didn’t notify subscribers and didn’t offer choices. Instead, I am now shifted to Esquire. Granted the deal was good — Esquire is giving me 3 issues for every 1 issue remaining on my Computer Shopper subscription (which means I’ll be getting Esquire until 2019, assuming it remains it print) — but the magazine is a junk magazine as far as I am concerned, i.e., one I wouldn’t buy or subscribe to or want as a gift. I could care less what Matt Damon thinks or even if he thinks (I do think he is an excellent actor; I just don’t care one whit about his personal life — or Letterman’s for that matter) and I really hate magazines that include perfume ads with samples that stink up the house, another Esquire “bonus”.

But the issue really is going from print to online only. I am unwilling to read a magazine or a newspaper at my computer. I already read more than I care to on my computer. If the magazines and newspapers can be properly displayed and read on a dedicated reading device like the forthcoming Sony Daily Edition, iRex 800, or Plastic Logic, then I would be willing to read them digitally. But absent that, I want to get away from my computer screens, not embrace them even more than I currently do.

And if a magazine is going to go digital only, it should offer me, in addition to the digital option, my money back for the unused portion of my subscription or a choice of print magazines to transfer my subscription to, or the option of “donating” my subscription to someone else — not force me to received more junk mail like Esquire.