
Subcompact Publishing - Tomte
http://craigmod.com/journal/subcompact_publishing/
======
smacktoward
All these words about how publishers need to jettison the legacy baggage of
their print mindsets, and make the simplest thing that could possibly work,
and how _The Magazine_ is the canonical example of someone who has
accomplished that feat.

And yet both the essay and _The Magazine_ (which folded last year:
[http://the-magazine.com/faq](http://the-magazine.com/faq)) organized
themselves around the idea that content is best organized as _articles_
bundled into _issues_ , which is a completely print-centric notion!

Why do articles have to be bundled into issues? The only reason for that
bundling is because the economics of print require it. But the economics of
online publishing are completely different. So why take it as written that
"issues" have to be a thing?

For that matter, why do _articles_ have to be a thing? If we're really trying
to get back to first principles, maybe the idea of corralling facts into a
narrative structure that's a certain number of words long should be
challenged, too. Maybe content is best delivered online like a stock ticker
instead, brief bursts of new material completely unmoored from each other,
with the reader left to tie them together however she wants to.

(Hey, we just invented Twitter!)

I don't want to bag on TFA too much, it was written in 2012 and it's easy to
take predictions from a few years back and poke holes in them with the
information we have that the predictor didn't. But it does feel like it's part
of a broader problem in publishing, which is people _thinking_ they're making
bold decisions and burning the bridges that connect them to the past, when in
fact they're still carting around tons of legacy baggage that they don't
_realize_ is legacy baggage because they've lived with it for so long they
just take it to be part of the environment. Which is why so many of
publishing's Great Big Online Experiments (such as, ahem, _The Magazine_ ) end
up feeling more like hedges against the future than daring attempts to seize
control of it.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"Why do articles have to be bundled into issues? The only reason for that
bundling is because the economics of print require it."

Not at all. An important function of magazines for readers is to hedge the
risk. When you buy a copy of _Popular Science_ or _Ellery Queen 's Mystery
Magazine_ or _Good Housekeeping_ , you know pretty well what kind of content
you're going to get. Even if you don't like every article or story, the
chances are you're going to enjoy most of them (assuming you're a fan of the
magazine to begin with).

Granted, there's still _some_ risk. Magazines do decline or change focus. The
risk is still smaller than what you'd get with an unknown author. Also the
price is usually less than you'd pay for a stand-alone work.

For the writers, the magazine exposes their work to an audience that might not
have heard of them before.

We're actually seeing a mini-boom in magazine-like entities in the indy
publishing world. Often they're called "bundles", but they're really not much
different than a classic magazine -- except that you don't need expensive
Manhattan real estate, printers, paper, postage, or any of the other factors
that have put so many traditional magazines on the skids.

