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Print Isn't Dead: How Linux Voice Crowdfunded a New Magazine
M-Saunders (706738) writes The death of print has been predicted for years, and many magazines and publishers have taken a big hit with the rise of eBooks and tablets. But not everyone has given up. Four geeks quit their job at an old Linux magazine to start Linux Voice, an independent GNU/Linux print and digital mag with a different publishing model: giving profits and content back to the community. Six months after a successful crowdfunding campaign, the magazine is going well, so here is the full story.
This is like the 4th story on "four guys who quit some magazine no one ever heard of start a new magazine no one will read"
https://www.google.com/search?...
They have like 3k subs. Can we agree not to give them a story until they get 50k or 100k subs?
They are using Slashdot as a promotional platform and place to farm refs for Wikipedia.
Linux is great. These 4 guys don't matter.
ah but they don't actually seem to be making a profit..
you know, you can always have a print magazine if you fund it through some other scheme than selling subs/issues.
(few thousand subs is like nooothiiiing)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Could you not do overly dramatic headlines on the front cover, please.
Last issue had "Learn to Hack" in massive yellow text.
Right in the middle of the News Corp phone hacking trial, the Snowden leaks, some police evidence tampering stories, as well as a few other computer security related things in the press at the time.
My postman avoids me now....
Just a friendly suggestion,
Ta
At least "Windows: The Official Magazine" is doing fine. I can easily speed up my sluggish OS, and if that's not enough, I can fix any problem, and as the ace in the sleeve I can find out how to reinstall Windows in just 1 hour. Once again we can see, that if I am in the proprietary software domain, information is easily available, and my workflow is never interrupted.
Who said that? We are making a profit... And we're going to give 50% of it back to the FOSS community at the end of the year.
I love linux periodicals, but the ones from Europe always seem to be extremely pricey, at least to US customers. For print, I intuitively understand that, but the digital-only prices always seem high to me.
1-Year US/Canada Subscription: 95 GBP == 162.13 US Dollar
1-Year Digital Subscription: 38 GBP == 64.86 US Dollar
I keep looking at Linux Format, but that has even higher digital-only prices.
My impulse buy point for digital subscriptions is maybe $50/year.
For comparison, I looked up a subscription I do have:
Linux Journal offers 24 issues for $49.50. I suppose it's more advertising-supported, but still.
Oh well. I'm glad that these periodicals exist, and I hope they do well enough to hang around. :-)
I find it a little disingenuous that they are saying that print isn't dying and then go on to say that they only have 3,000 subscribers.
And my biggest problem with print magazines is exactly as you stated. If they have a print and online version, by the time you get your copy in the mail, you could have easily just already read the online version. Unless they purposely delay the online version, which is an equally bad idea. But why stop there. Why even delay individual articles until there's a whole magazine's worth. Why not just publish individual articles online as they become available.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
We only have one page of news per month. We're not competing with the internet for speed -- we're aiming to have the best quality technical content. "Getting information off the internet is like drinking from a firehose." Sure, there's a huge amount of useful stuff out there, but it can be hard to find it all. Those who are happy to trawl through it may not want our magazine, but those who like a monthly dose of features, tutorials, interviews and other content can get it with us.