brian said:
> Before committing to a subscription model,
> publishers need to know what’s involved in
> making that happen, not once, but every issue.
oh boy, does this take me back a long way! :+)
it’s _easy_ to make an electronic-magazine issue…
if you do it the right way.
i can’t remember the exact year, but i was working
on a mac running system 7, and it was “pre-web”,
so i’d guess it was sometime around 1994 or so…
i talked to the people at macworld, and suggested
that i could make an electronic version of their rag.
they were interested, and said i should send a demo.
i basically stripped all their _text_ out of one issue
-- the cover article, their feature articles, all of their
software and hardware reviews, all of their content --
and put it all into my standalone e-book program…
the funny thing was that it was under 1.2megs, total,
which i remember because the thing fit on a diskette.
when i sent them the demo, they totally freaked out;
said what i’d done was a violation of copyright and
how they’d sue if i continued, etc. i was perplexed,
because they had _asked_ me to send them a demo!
it occurred to me that they went nuts because i had
made it totally clear to them (and thus to everyone)
just how little _content_ they were providing in the
mass of advertising they were wrapping around it…
i don’t think they wanted to face the fact that their
product was as thin on the ground as it actually is.
i was reminded of this recently, when wired choose
to convert all of their text into jpgs for their e-mag,
thereby bloating one issue up to 500megs.
-bowerbird
p.s. i continued to use the macworld content in my
demos, but swapped out the vowels randomly, and
thus turned it into an e-magazine called “mocwurld”.
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