It's Out! Galaxis #5

The latest edition of my little digital free magazined devoted to science and science fiction is now out.

It's Galaxis #5, and it's a special science-fiction television preview issue, with a roundup of upcoming genre shows—Foundation, The X-Files, and more. We've also got an interview with author David Gerrold, a portfolio of Mandelbrot art, a report on the Hugos controversy, seasons 2 and 3 of our Star Trek: The Next Generation episode guide, and much more, including our big reviews section.

To 4,000 and Beyond – in a Flash

The latest (and last) issue of Galaxis, my free digital magazine of science and science fiction, was only released two weeks ago, but it has already been seen by more than 4,000 people. By way of comparison, it took many months for each of the previous three issues of Galaxis to hit those numbers.

So as an individualist, as much as it pains me to suggest you join the crowd: Join the crowd — because I think you'll find that this personal journey through the worlds of science and SF is thought-provoking, fun, and inspiring. And in a few months when I release the first book-form Galaxis Reader, I hope you'll come along for that evolutionary form of my Galaxis project.

A Little Page Design Moment

Just something I created for my Facebook page in an attempt to play with page spreads from the three issues of my Galaxis science/science fiction digital magazine (available free at issuu.com).

1,000 Points of Sight: Galaxis Number 3

Open publication - Free publishing - More battlestar

The third edition of my free digital science & science fiction magazine, Galaxis, has reached its first milestone in record time. Not even a full month since it was published on issuu.com, Galaxis #3 has racked up 1,000 views. That is, I believe, faster than the previous two issues or any of my digital magazines has reached that milestone.

My thanks to everyone who has looked at the issue, read it, shared it with their blog/Facebook/Twitter followers, sent me feedback, or showered me with offers of glory. Granted, none of the last has happened, but one can hope.

On to 2,000!

Galaxis Hits 5,000

Open publication - Free publishing - More comics

The second issue of Galaxis magazine, my digital science fiction/science magazine, has reached 5,000 readers.

I'm still hip-deep in putting together the third issue; I clearly have missed the ship date for Galaxis three (or Galaxis drei, as I refer to it internally, keeping with the German name). But this third issue will be the biggest yet, and it will include an analysis of Star Wars' mythic roots, a complete episode guide to the original Battlestar Galactica (as a complement to my guide to the new Galactica in Galaxis two – or Galaxis zwei, if you're still with me), an update on Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome, checking in with rising young science fiction author Charles Yu, a look inside the Hadron collider at CERN, presidential SF preferences, my review/analysis of Prometheus, the search for Earth-like planets, and a ton more. Look for it in the next couple months.

In the meantime, click on the image above to see/read/print/download the second issue of Galaxis, featuring the SyFy Galactica episode guide, a trip to Saturn, the world's first science fiction story, Lyle Lahey's Bunky comic, building the first real starship, German science fiction history, and – again – a ton more.

Keep reading!

I'm Shrinking

A couple years ago, I complained on this blog about periodicals that published miniature versions of their magazines even while they continued to publish the normal-sized versions of their magazines. It seems to be a thing that fashion magazines are doing, for no reason I can figure out.

And yet, here I am today, to show off the new miniature version of my print-on-demand digital magazine Galaxis. A little background: I use issuu.com, an online digital publications platform. On Issuu, people can publish, distribute, and read digital magazines, all displayed wonderfully in high-quality formats that even replicate the visual appeal of a physical magazine. At the same time, I use MagCloud, an online print-on-demand digital publications platform created by HP, to distribute my magazines to anyone who might wish to purchase a hard copy. Print and digital: friends, not enemies.

But upon logging into my Issuu account recently, I noticed a new option, one only available for me to use on my own publications: I could order a print-on-demand hard copy. Among the options were to have the publication perfect-bound (with a square, glued spine instead of staples), color or converted to grayscale black-and-white, and even to shrink the publication and print it in a smaller format. I chose the latter, with color covers but converting the full-color interior of the second issue of Galaxis to black-and-white.

The mini-Galaxis arrived a few weeks later, sent from Europe, where Issuu is based. (See photo above.) It looks fantastic. It is still a ridiculous extravagance to have a mini version of a full-sized magazine, but since my digital magazines are largely a self-indulgent extravagance anyway, I'm pleased to have it.

I continue to believe that these digital platforms are great steps along the way to reinventing and saving magazines (in both printed hard copy form and digital form), but for now, the per-page cost is simply too high for someone to launch a commercial magazine through the print-on-demand options. And launching a commercially successful magazine (in print and digital) is my goal. MagCloud charges about 20 cents per page, which adds  up pretty quickly to eye-popping prices; Issuu's print-on-demand service is even more expensive.

I still think that the long-term resolution will involve greatly evolved print-at-home capabilities, but for most people, that would be science fiction. Hence, I love it.

• View and even download the digital editions of my Galaxis and Magma magazines.

            or

• Purchase print editions of Galaxis and Magma from MagCloud's print-on-demand service.

4,000 and counting: Galaxis Science Fiction and Science

Open publication - Free publishing - More comics

This morning I woke up to a milestone – no, that's not something a doctor needs to remove. It's a marker of achievement. This morning's milestone was 4,000, the number of people who have read or sampled my all-digital magazine Galaxis.

Yes, 4,000 people is a small group compared to the tens of thousands or millions of big magazines. But for a magazine entirely written, designed, produced, and marketed by one person – me, with the exception of the cover painting – I think 4,000 is a good number for now.

"For now" because that number keeps growing. Have you read Galaxis? If you're into science and science fiction, you might want to take a look. (And if you're really into paper editions, you can purchase a print-on-demand copy from MagCloud.) Except for the print-on-demand edition, Galaxis is free to read online or even download to your computer/smartphone/tablet/whatever. Just look for the download link or icon.

Bertelsmann Going Public? Say It Isn't So, ...

Above: A detail screenshot from Bertelsmann's homepage.

The New York Post is reporting that "stodgy" – the Post's word, not mine – international media company Bertelsmann is making moves and giving signs that it could go at least partly public, after being run as a private company for 177 years.

Don't go toward the cliff, lemming.

Bertelsmann is still based in the German town of Gütersloh (current population less than 100,000) where it was founded as a Christian book publisher. Over the years, it grew into a mega-media company, owning everything from the producer of "American Idol" to broadcaster RTL to RTL Group (Europe's biggest production company) to iconic weekly German magazine Stern. Oh, it also owns Random House, its publishing arm Gruner + Jahr is the largest publishing house in Europe, and on and on.

Yet it keeps getting corporate chiefs who want to make radical changes, including going public, an option its controlling Mohn family members rejected a decade ago but which they apparently are considering now.

Bertelsmann, don't go public. You will get a cash infusion of money, yes, but you will lose control, even if, as the Post reports, you're taking legal steps to ensure continued control by the Mohn family. In a world of investors and funds that have absolutely no care in the world about a company's culture or history or anything but increasing quarterly dividends and stock prices, you'll be awash in shareholder lawsuits any time the stock drops. They will demand you drop slower-growth properties. They will tie the hands of your high-flying CEO. They will demand you strip out costs – er, investment, as real businesspeople call it – and throw money into dividends. That will make it actually more difficult to move into risky, developing markets, which is what the Post says is your goal.

Bertelsmann itself says in a press release that it's healthy. It reported a successful 2011 with "revenues of continuing operations rising 1.2 percent to €15.3 billion in the year under review (previous year: €15.1 billion). Organic growth was 1.7 percent. Operating EBIT reached €1.75 billion (previous year: €1.83 billion), remaining stable at a high level. The return on sales was 11.4 percent (previous year: 12.1 percent), once again demonstrating the profitability of the Group."

That doesn't sound like a sick patient to me, and it sounds like they've got money to make some riskier project launches, if that's what they want to do.

Wall Street is reportedly thrilled with the prospect of Bertelsmann becoming more, er, worldly, but one doesn't have to be anti-capitalist to think that a company is being lured into the alleyways so it can be taken for all its got. Bertelsmann the private company is a great symbol of capitalist success. Don't ruin it.

And You Thought I Was Dreaming: Is the Magazine's Savior Already on the Market?

My sister, who works in the book business, let me know about the above video. The video's intended for publishing industry people who might buy the machine, but I post it here because it represents an exciting advance in print-on-demand and on-the-spot retailing. It is being pitched as a way for book publishers to keep their backlist available to customers without having to risk printing and distributing thousands of copies.

Readers of this blog know that my focus is more on the magazine business, and I think this could be similarly helpful for publishers of current magazines.

As I wrote a few years ago, I don't think the magazine business model has collapsed; it's the magazine distribution market that's collapsed. Retailers are carrying many fewer titles, fewer distributors even exist, and newsstand publishers still have to print untold copies of each issue that will never be sold but will instead end up in the shredders after they sit unsold on a magazine rack for a week or month. The cost of those over-print quantities is of course added to what customers pay for the copies they do buy. Therefore, I predicted that the salvation of the hard-copy print magazine will come from continued advances in personal printer technology, so that one day you can download and print out a fully bound, high quality magazine that's identical to one you would have picked up at the possibly non-existent newsstand or retailer. And those still-existing retailers could have such printers in their stores, where they print and sell copies as they need them.

If the magazine that this Espresso Book Machine can produce can be sold at a reasonable price, it could not only help all of us domestic publishers, but it could spawn hundreds of new publishers, and it could make it possible for a small magazine retailer to sell far more magazine titles than they can normally stock on their shelves; they could sell publications from all around the world, current copies and back issues.

There's probably still more development to go before this could be utilized for magazines (after all, photo-heavy magazines would require different paper, inks, and resolution than an all-text book interior), but magazine publishers and editors and advertisers and designers and writers and readers should start clamoring for it now.

Galaxis Now Available on MagCloud Print-on-Demand

My new magazine, Galaxis: The Worlds of Science & Science Fiction, is not only available on issuu but now you can order a printed copy via our pals at MagCloud. I just received my copy, and it looks very nifty.

Click on the button below to learn more.

Galaxis Issue 1: Number 1

The premiere issue of Galaxis: The Worlds of Science and Science Fiction includes interviews with Michio Kaku, Fred Barzyk, Mary Doria Russell, Leonard Susskind, & others, plus a retrospective of Star Wars magazines, David Gerrold's Starhunt books, Virgin Galactic's private space fleet, and much…

Free Galaxis and Magma Magazines for Your Android Mobile Devices -- from Issuu.com

Issuu.com, the free digital publishing platform I use for my magazines, has created a nifty mobile app that lets you download and view digital magazines from its online newsstand.

Galaxis is my newest publication, and it features articles, interviews, and reviews from the worlds of science and science fiction. You can read it at Issuu. Magma is my other publication, produced earlier this year and focused on the magazine industry. It is also on Issuu.

You can read (and download to your computer) both magazines at Issuu on your computer, or you can now download the entire magazines to your Android mobile device. It's all free. The mobile reader lets you view the entire page on your screen; to zoom in to read the text, you just double-tap on the text and it comes up in a clear text reader. I tried it, and it's very quick, cool, and easy to use.

You can get the app either by going to m.issuu.com on your phone's browser, or do what I did and get the free Issuu app from the Android Market on your phone (just open the Market application, and search for "issuu").

As for you iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch users, you'll have to keep holding your breath. Issuu says it's been trying to get Apple to approve a version for its mobile devices, but Apple keeps rejecting it. I have an iPod Touch that I like very much, so I hope they can get on board the Apple express in the near future.

PS: I should have some exciting news from the world of MagCloud to announce within the next week.

Mr. Magazine Busts the Numbers of the Latest Magazines-Are-Dying Report

Samir Husni, aka Mr. Magazine (aka Professor Husni at the University of Mississippi School of Journalism) takes apart some lazy reporting about declines in magazine circulation. As usual, Dr. Husni makes good points and demonstrates his knowledge of the breadth of newsstand magazines today.

It's just the latest in the seemingly never-ending debate over the heath of the print magazine industry, in which I work and about which I care a great deal.

On another front in that same war, I have an ongoing debate with a friend over the whole print-vs-digital magazines matter. As I've stated here (and here, extensively) before, magazines that try to do what digital does better are cutting their own throats. Print magazines should offer the in-depth, designed presentation that they do better than online. They should not try to be print versions of web sites with short articles and brain-dead writing that caters to ADD readers.

But beyond that, I do find myself wondering about the need that anti-print people have to kill magazines. Frankly, I don't understand it. I happen to love print and digital, and I have worked in both media. Print mags are hardly standing in the way of digital publications of all kinds, so it's not as if these digital-or-nothing people are in a kill-or-be-killed conflict. Why do they glory over every print magazine that dies, and why do they flame every print magazine that refuses to die?

If they don't like print magazines, then they should just ignore them. After all, I couldn't care less about jai alai, but I don't spend time criticizing it and arguing that everyone who plays it is doomed to irrelevance. Why don't I? Because I genuinely don't care about jai alai. If you love jai alai, don't write me a list of reasons I should love it, too. I just picked that game as one example of the millions of things about which I care not one bit. In short, I think the anti-print people's obsession with the health or ill health of print magazines shows they care about it a great deal. One just can't figure out why.

Have the anti-print people been abused by print magazines in their lifetime, and are they bearing a grudge against this horrible industry? Did they fear that magazines were lurking underneath their childhood beds, waiting to pop out and force them to read long articles on monetary policy or Ray Harryhausen retrospectives? Did they walk down dark alleys on their way to school, fearful of stacks of unread magazines waiting to beat them up and take their lunch money?

I suspect the real reason is related to the fact that magazines remain a challenge to the kool-aid that some of these people have gulped down. They believe that speed and ephemeral trends are the keys to success in the future, and they can't book any contradiction. If print magazines remain a viable source of entertainment and education and information-exchange, then were they really wise to spend hundreds of dollars on that new digital reader? (which they'll replace with a new model in 12-18 months?)

I probably confront more of this kind of anti-print thought than many of you, because I live and work in San Francisco, the heart of the new economy (the good and the bad, the grounded and the fake). But short-sighted, emotion-driven thinking birthed here often drives investment decisions across this country, and it's certainly doing so in the magazine industry. It's also driving publishing decisions. How many magazines do you know that used to run full-page subscription ads for themselves every issue now don't run any? (I can name two off the top of my head.) If the publishers themselves have decided to downgrade their print medium or have given up on it, then why should they expect readers to make a commitment to their print product?

And giving readers a reason to make a commitment to print magazines is what periodicals publishing is about, when it's done successfully. They make a commitment to subscribe to a magazine (which plays into the wacky newsstand numbers Dr. Husni dissects in his commentary cited above), or they make a commitment to look at a magazine each issue on the magazine rack and decide whether they want to purchase it.

It's a greater commitment than deciding to bookmark a web site.

To Reiterate: Magma, Now in Print-on-Demand

Magma Issue 1:

February 2011

By John Zipperer in Entertainment

The magazine industry review. Premiere issue. Inside: Starlog, Conde Nast, National Lampoon, what's wrong with guest editors, the decline and fall of gay magazines, and much more.

Magma Magazine – Digital and in Print

The other day, I announced the "publication" of my free digital magazine, Magma, which is filled with features and short bits all about the magazine industry. It's available for reading online or downloading from issuu.com.

Today, a treat arrived in the mail: A print edition of Magma's first issue. It was produced by our pals at MagCloud, an HP print-on-demand online service. I do love digital publishing, but my biggest affection is saved for print magazines, so it is wonderful to page through a real live print magazine that was created on my computer. Handling a print magazine instead of viewing a digital magazine is the difference between seeing a photo of the Himalayas and walking amidst them yourself.

When I transferred the file to MagCloud, I did not adjust the page size for MagCloud's slightly smaller trim size, so some of the outside margins are cut closer than I'd like. But other than that, it's a nifty magazine, and I'm proud of it. 

Check it out yourself. The free digital version or purchase the print-on-demand version.

Norman Spinrad on the Publishing Death Spiral, or: Why You Can't Buy Any New Spinrad Novels

Writer Norman Spinrad writes on his blog that a cruel math at the largest book retailers is putting ever-downward pressure on authors like him, resulting in fewer book orders and eventually no publisher is willing to take the risk of buying a manuscript.

Read his blog posts for the full scoop: Part One | Part Two

I'll just add that from what I've heard from people in the industry, publishers are expecting new authors to come to them with existing audiences, often audiences that have been followers of a writer's blog. Show me that 5,000 people read your blog every month, or that 15,000 people have downloaded your free self-published fiction on the web, and then we'll talk about a print run. Whatever the numbers are, I'm not sure. But publishers want a built-in audience, because they're not taking chances. They're also not doing as much promotion of books as they used to do. Book tours are nearly a thing of the past. Authors are expected to become distribution experts in their own right.

In the comments section of Spinrad's first blog post, he responds to readers who push electronic publishing as an alternative to the print model. It's something he's tried, but he says the money's just not there yet. That's a pretty telling commentary, because e-books are where those big booksellers are going in a big way. They are retooling their entire businesses to push e-books.

As a magazine publisher, I've been watching (and discussing on this blog) the disarray in print publishing for years. To an important extent, it's an inevitable change, the outcome of which is not yet clear. But it's also partly a self-fulfilling groupthink momentum. Everyone knows print is dead, but they can't figure out why it won't die, nor can they figure out a business model to replace it. As I've written here before, I think the people who are most eager for magazines, books, and newspapers to cease publishing are the same people who most misunderstand what a reader actually gets out of reading those publications. But the momentum is behind the idea that everything must go electronic.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: The internet does some things much better than print, and print does some things better than the 'net. Each should do what it does best, and they can complement each other that way. But when even print publishers are eager to shed their print side because their funders, critics, and some readers have emotionally invested in the death of print, then we are not likely to see a workable realignment of the print industry come about with the current generation of print leaders (most of whom seem to be MBAs instead of publishers).

Writers such as Norman Spinrad get hurt in this situation. Periodicals writers and editors get hurt in this situation. And readers get hurt in this situation, as their print publications become thinner and stupider and abbreviated and less frequent.

When Religions Control Newspapers and Magazines

When I was a child, my newspaper-and-magazine editing mother held The Christian Science Monitor in high esteem. The paper was indeed well-regarded in media circles, I would learn later on my own as I moved into the industry. This despite the fact indicated by its name: it's owned by the Christian Science religious sect. The paper was still known as a publication that kept its news reporting separate from the views of its owners, and that was good.

Today, watching the implosion of the Unification Church-controlled, right-wing Washington Times, one gets to read all kinds of allegations of interference from the church's leadership, including its self-styled messiah.

Today comes word from The New York Times that Governing magazine has been sold to a California company owned and run by Scientologists. This has worried a number of staffers, because the Florida company that sold the magazine also owns the St. Petersburg Times, a well-regarded newspaper that has won acclaim for its reporting -- most significantly, its reporting on the Scientology cult. I mean church. Read the Times article for some clues about what might be in store for the staff. Such as a book club, maybe. Catholic Online -- another media operation whose ownership link is pretty obvious from its name -- goes further, citing sources that suggest greater involvement of the cult -- er, church, I've got to get that right -- in the operations of e.Republic, the new owners of Governing.

I'll admit to being somewhat torn. Not by Scientology; I've read way too many exposes of that organization over the years to see it as anything but a serious danger. But I don't think a religious owner -- even one with wacky religious beliefs -- should be an automatic reason for rejection in the media world. We are coming out of a very ahistorical period where mass media was controlled by faceless, nonideological, nonreligious public corporations, and we've entered an era that is more normal for this country and possibly the world: People and organizations start up newspapers and web sites and conferences and magazines and book companies because they want to support a worldview. That worldview might be wacky, it might be dangerous, it might be sweet and good. There will be more of all beliefs and worldviews out there.

We just have to make it so that if your new boss tries to force you to read a book and take a creepy seminar, you are able to tell him or her to take a flying leap and still keep your job.

Death of Another Gay Magazine: The Advocate

Gay news-and-features magazine The Advocate will be folding, transforming into a 32-page insert in sister publication Out. That's the word from Queerty, which adds that the move follows "massive" layoffs at the title. "Some freelance and contract writers and photogs, meanwhile, have gone unpaid for months; some have threatened to stop working entirely until their balances are paid," reports Queerty.

Youch. I once briefly worked at a small magazine publisher that had been unable to pay some of its freelancers for about nine months. My short tenure there -- I jumped ship to a stable company after just two months -- was made sad by the constant hectoring from writers with very legitimate complaints about payments. Some of them needed it for rent or mortgage payments, and the poor accounts payable staffer had the unenviable job of fielding these requests/pleas/threats and paying the most urgent of them.

That company limped along for another couple years before it finally sold its assets. But it sounds like The Advocate's life will be shorter. (Owner Regent/Here Media already shuttered two of its gay porn titles, Men and Freshmen.)

Journalist and blogger (and he knows the difference) Matthew Rettenmund shares some thoughts on the loss of this long-lasting magazine and what it means to the gay community: "The Advocate has been around for 40 years chronicling gay news, following politics, tracing fads, providing a means by which stars (gay and straight) could directly reach a captive LGBT (not just G and not just L) audience. The death of The Advocate feels like a symptom of the admittedly slow death of 'gay' as an identity."

Frankly, I don't know if I'll miss The Advocate. It was only an occasional buy for me. I'm of the generation that did not go through Stonewall and that was still ignorant of my own homosexuality during the height (depths?) of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Nonetheless, I can still appreciate those who came before me and took on much bigger anti-gay boogeymen than I have had to face. But my intellectual response has always been to reject the magazine's simplistic attachment to outdated gay politics of the 1970s.

That said, Rettenmund is correct: The surviving media -- straight and gay alike -- is not prepared to cover gay topics well, and are unlikely to being to do so just because The Advocate has died. A new magazine is needed, but I'll be darned if I know what it is.

The Art of the Licensed Movie Magazine (as told by David McDonnell)

Editor David McDonnell's blog over at Starlog.com has an interesting story about the company's involvement (and mostly non-involvement) with publishing a licensed magazine for the Indiana Jones films and TV series. It's a tale of something that didn't come to be, but for people interested in the publishing business -- as I am -- or just movie-lovers who are interested in knowing how their favorite merchandise comes to appear in the store for them to purchase, it's a great article.

It also reminds me of my one and only visit to the Starlog offices, back in 1999. I was getting a tour of the offices from one of the mag's founders, and we got an earful from top editors and publishers about the politics of publishing a licensed magazine for one of the biggest blockbusters of that year. (I'll leave out that film company's name to avoid stepping on any toes; besides, that was a year of many blockbusters, so good luck guessing.) Starlog Group had tried to get rights to a licensed magazine for the film, but the price was so steep that it'd be nearly impossible to recoup the cost, much less make a profit. Another publisher did snap up the rights, but it paid so much that Starlog Group was slapping its forehead in dismay (if a company had a slappable forehead -- but you know what I mean) over what the other publisher would have to do to make it work.

Licensed magazines can be a money machine, if they're well-chosen. I also suspect they're a little bit like broadcasting the Olympics is for network TV. The winning network usually pays a ton for the rights and, or so I read once, doesn't recoup enough of its investment in advertising; instead, it gets a long-term payback by being able to promote its own shows throughout the two-week run of Olympics coverage, and that provides a boost to ratings (and thus broad-based advertising revenue) in future weeks and months. Similarly, movie magazines allow the publisher to devote a page or two to advertising its other titles and products. Take away the licensing biz from a publisher, and you take away more than one benefit it was receiving.

McDonnell explains how Starlog Group President/Publisher Norman Jacobs structured his licensing deals (again, a nice tidbit for magazine geeks like me to know; probably overkill for you). At one time (I believe in the 1980s), Starlog Group was the number-one publisher of licensed magazines. Over the years, the company did everything from Star Trek (TNG, DS9, Voyager) to Baywatch to Terminator 2 to The Untouchables and on and on and on, until that business dried up for them a decade or so ago. I would have loved to see what they could have and would have done with a magazine on the new Battlestar Galactica, but now I'm just compounding geekness upon geekness.

These days, the licensed movie magazine section of your local friendly Borders has been totally colonized by Britain's Titan Magazines, which did in fact publish a Galactica magazine, and still produces them for CSI: Miami, Torchwood, Star Wars, and others. I wonder what their licensing deal is like.

Maybe You'll Get that Next Issue, Maybe You Won't

The ever-snarky Magazine Death Pool reports today that Seed magazine has informed subscribers that the August issue hadn't mailed yet and they didn't know when it would be mailed. I'm not a subscriber, so I can't confirm that, but it doesn't sound good.

Seed always struck me as a magazine with good content that was totally undercut by an inexplicably bad design. Nonetheless, if the MDP report is true, I'd be sorry to see the death of a science magazine. Let's face it: Our world is not suffering from a surfeit of rational thought and actions.

But it does remind me of my brief sojourn at a small tech magazine half a dozen years ago. I basically relaunched the magazine under a new title and only stayed for a few issues before moving to a better job, but I never saw any of the issues on which I worked. That's right: We never got them back from the printer, because the publishing company was so far behind in its bills.

Presumably they eventually paid some of their bills, because the magazine limped along for another year or two before going to that great magazine rack in the sky. But I've never found a copy of any of those issues that I put together (and for which I wrote a lot of articles, pleaded with a lot of writers to write articles -- because we were so far behind in paying writers -- and edited a lot of articles).

Has any publisher ever missed mailing two or three issues of a magazine and then had a recovery that led to them publishing the title for another decade or so? I doubt it, and I really doubt it today, when advertising is scarce and investor or bank credit is difficult to get.

Printcasting: Turning Blogs into Magazines

Even I, stalwart defender of the printed periodical, was given pause by a recent article in The New York Times about Printcasting, a web site that lets people create print magazines from their blogs.

Supported by the Knight Foundation, the site is a free service for using a blog as a content feed for the online magazine creation system. You can also include blog items from other Printcaster users, and advertising is shared across the network. You can alert subscribers when a new issue is available and they can download it and print it out themselves. (A better description of the services is available here.)

It's an interesting concept. Yes, most people with blogs don't want a print edition. But let's face it: Lots of people create blogs because they can't afford to do a print publication; this service lets them have both options, so I think there will definitely be a customer base for Printcasting, even if the customers are just printing out copies and leaving them at coffee shops.

Though the designs of the publications are limited, it's still another interesting idea for merging the worlds of online and print. As I've noted here before about the print-on-demand magazine publisher MagCloud, by taking the distribution challenge out of the equation (and costs) of the prospective small publisher, the digital revolution could actually spawn a renaissance in magazines, and not be its death. MagCloud is different in that it is a printer service, where the publishers upload (at no cost) their magazine files to MagCloud, which uses its network of high-quality HP printers to produce the magazines on demand and mail them to the buyers.

Printcasting goes one step backward in terms of design quality but one step forward toward my prediction of direct-to-buyer printing, by which I mean the publisher creates the magazine, sends it in digital form to the customer, who prints it out on his/her increasingly professional home or office printer.

This revolution is starting to become fun!