Amazon’s Kindle Fire has, perhaps broken a barrier with the easiest access to online magazine subscriptions I’ve seen. That’s the strength of the Fire: it’s an incredibly effective portal for buying content – and, frankly, anything else Amazon has to offer. The Fire’s downsides are:

Size: The 7-inch screen is simply too small for enjoyable magazine or newspaper reading. Even the magnification feature doesn’t go far enough, and it intereferes with smooth nagivation on the page and from one page to the next.

Weight: Holding the fire is a little bit like holding a flat, shiny, somewhat sexy brick. It’s a load – though it might provide interesting synergy with a bodybuilding magazine.

More-than-occasional glitchiness: The touch-screen doesn’t always respond well; sometimes it seems too sensitive and others not sensitive enough. For magazine and newspaper viewing, that makes page scrolls and page turns an unpleasant guessing game.

Limited media offerings: All of the other issues will likely be mitigated in subsequent versions of the Fire. But where Amazon’s strength has always been the scope of available content, periodical choices seem limited. Perhaps I’m wrong on that; perhaps the available choice reflect the current  range of publications that have dedicated themselves to the future of digital content consumption. But if Amazon wants to emerge as the leading content delivery platform, than it’s going to need to move away from teh curated approach that it takes with apps and seems to be taking with periodicals.

So what other options do magazine publishers have if they don’t want to be limited by (or captive to) Amazon’s subscription model?

Here’s an interesting new approach: TinyPass.com is a startup paywall service that offers the kind of flexibility publishers need. Payment can be accepted through any means – from PayPal to Amazon to Google Wallet to a dedicated merchant account. And content can be delivered in any distribution model: paywall, metered, pay-per-use, etc. According to PaidContent, it even accommodates varied content models – such as the ability to split revenue with contributors.

TinyPass is a young copy and I’ve not done enough due diligence to predict its success. But it certainly represents the kind of flexibile functionality that the publishing world needs if its growth curve for selling digital content is going to continue.

At the time of its launch, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch – who may be the world’s most aggressive evangelist for the concept of people actually paying for digital content – said he would consider The Daily to be successful when it has 500,000 subscribers.

Assuming The Daily maintains its average of 10,000 new subscribers per month, that puts it at its defined level of success in another 42 months – less than five years from startup.

For a big-deal project that utilizes new technology and depends on changing some of the most basic behaviors of its intended audience, that doesn’t sound like a bad ramp-up to me.

USA Today took far longer to become successful. Facebook became bigger faster, but it has never charged users and it took at least as long for the company to deploy a meaningful business model. Netflix expected to LOSE nearly 600,000 subscribers in 2011′s Q3 – simply because it removed DVD service as a cheap add-on for its paid digital (streamed) content. Compared to these, The Daily appears to be moving toward its goals very nicely.

The Daily also hasn’t expanded beyond the iPad platform, which has limited potential subscribers. If/when it’s made available for Droid devices and the new generation of e-readers, I expect that paid subscriptions will begin to increase beyond an average of 10,000 per month. By the time it has 250,000 or so subscribers, enough people will hear about The Daily in the course of their ordinary comings and goings that it will also pass a threshold of importance for a whole new audience of people who, at this moment, still refuse to spend money on a digital subscription.

Over time, the notion of paying for digital content will become normal; at that point, many of the media that are waiting for The Daily to fail will begin to benefit from the expensive groundwork that Murdoch’s company has chosen to undertake. They too will begin charging for their content; they too will struggle until reaching a level of critical mass. But they’ll have the luxury of doing that work without the scrutiny that The Daily is receiving now.

I’m saying all this without ever having read The Daily, as I’m not an iPad user. Perhaps it’s not a great product. Perhaps even people within News Corp. are disappointed that The Daily has just 80,000 paid subscriptions.

But I’ve learned over time that the toughest sell is the one that requires prospective buyers to change their behavior before spending money. At that, it sounds to me like The Daily is already successful.

Let’s call it the Hard Goods Rule: Buy good equipment and take good care of it.

Nothing provides better affirmation and aids in a better outloook than moving through the details of the day with equipment that works easily, well and with the rarest of failure.

If you need to buy a printer for your office, don’t settle for the $25 model that comes along as a premium with your computer. I’ve learned that lesson too many times. Go out and spend what you it takes to buy a durable, solid printer that runs and runs. Buy the features you need and just pay the price. If you find yourself leaning toward a cheap compromise, imagine yourself being late out the door and suddenly remembering a document you forgot to bring along. You’re in your winter coat and boots, leaning over the computer, the dog is barking because he thinks you’re going to take him for a walk, and you get a paper jam, or a message that the printer is out of magenta. With a cheap printer, this seems to happen 1 out of 2 times (thought it’s probably more like 1-in-5).

Visualize this and you’ll spend the good money.

A corollary to this rule is the Hard Goods Corollary: More power/fewer features.

Here are some tools and equipment to which the Rule of Hard Goods and Corollary apply:

• Computer printer
• Power tools (A drill shouldn’t drill just some stuff. For an extra $60 you can get a drill to drill any stuff. That’ll amortize to about $1.50 anytime you need to drill something really hard over the next 10 years).
• Lawnmower
• Computer (The reason people pay more for a Mac.)
• Camera
• Snowblower (If you want to wrestle with a piece of equipment, you’ll spend less and fare better against a snow shovel.)
• Winter coat
• Washer/Dryer (It’s all about power. Features break over time; a powerful machine runs forever.)
• Stapler (Unless you never plan to staple more than 4 sheets at a time.)
• Sporting goods (Whatever your passion – golf, tennis, baseball, sailing, jai alai – equipment that doesn’t go all the way just saps the fun. You may as well stay home to figure out what’s wrong with that g-d- Scanner/Copyer/Fax/Printer/Stickintheeye.)

There’s a place in the world for cheap stuff. If you’ve never been camping, never want to go camping, but you absolutely have to go camping just this once for one night with your son and the Cub Scouts, then go to Wal-Mart and buy the $39 two-man tent. You can buy a good tent for the next time you go.

Thank you Microsoft, for taking our privacy out of the hands of the calcified Congress, and putting it back where it belongs: with each of us. If you’re not careful, people might start to like you again.