When I was in college (yes, it was awhile ago) I came across a book in the stacks of the campus library, titled "How to Publish a Newsletter".

I was intrigued. The idea fascinated me. But, at the time it wasn't something I had the time (or money) to develop, and as a snot-nosed young college student I wasn't sure exactly what it was I would be able to write about.

Fast forward to several years later. I was subscribed to a monthly newsletter for professional tool and blade sharpeners (one of my early business endeavors).

It was a crudely-typed and quick-printed or photocopied affair, several pages stapled together, folded over, and mailed.

As it turned out, the publisher of the newsletter was located nearby in the small Midwestern city I was living in at the time. So, I looked up the address and visited the newsletter's editor at his office.

He was an older gentleman, and his office was a single hole-in-the-wall room in a run-down commercial office building, with a single desk, a typewriter, a phone, and papers and all manner of books, magazines, and product brochures piled up everywhere.

He was very gracious and welcoming, and we had a nice visit. He confided to me that he had perhaps a few hundred subscribers to his monthly newsletter, scattered out all across the country.

His newsletter wasn't making him rich, he told me, but it did provide a bit of an income, enough to pay the bills and his office rent, and he thoroughly enjoyed the interactions he had at trade shows and the correspondance from his subscriber sharpeners.

Time moved on, as did my jobs and business adventures. It wasn't too long before this new-fangled thing called the "Internet" started to eat away at the small, independent newsletter publishers and direct-mail marketers.

Junk mailers and sleazy marketers found that they no longer had to send out expensive printed direct-mail pieces to rented mailing lists, when email could put the same information into hundreds of thousands, if not millions of email boxes - for free!

But do you know what? The easier it became to send out information, the less valuable and notable it became - easily overlooked, and easily lost.

Over the years I'd say I've spent literally thousands of dollars on digital information products.

I've got computer disks and hard drives full of them, most of which haven't seen the light of day since I first downloaded the files and saved them to some computerized folder icon - never to be seen or read again.

But, guess what? To this day I will still come across those old printed newsletters in my file drawer, and they are just as fascinating and informative to read now as the day I received them.