Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2000 09:55:37 +0000 (GMT)
From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com>
To: rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG (Robert Watson)
Cc: freebsd@planet.nl (Marc Veldman), Jacob.Ludington@ed.state.ia.us (Ludington Jacob), freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG ('freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG'), advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: BSD Magazine
Message-ID: <200009210955.CAA09465@usr05.primenet.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1000916214230.6644B-100000@fledge.watson.org> from "Robert Watson" at Sep 16, 2000 09:48:52 PM
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> I want something on paper. While e-mail and the web are cool, they are > far from persistent. I can't read a file written ten years ago in the > standard word processing tool of the day. Any articles I read and enjoyed > on any commercial or main-stream electronic services are now long gone. I > have now assurance that www.daemonnews.org is going to work in ten years > time when I want to reference a technical article there in a paper I > write. And printers don't cut it -- I have enough leaf-litter of unsorted > and un-indexed papers lying around already. > > I'd happily pay the going rate for magazines to get a nicely bound > twice to three times as thick Daemon News. At one point, Jordan was > spitting out FreeBSD newsletters on paper -- throw that stuff in also, > maybe reviews of recent major commits on various platform source trees > (sort of like the new stuff page on the NetBSD web site) so people (users, > developers) from various projects can keep up-to-date. The problem with a print version is the same problem with most e-commerce. People want the electronic version, and there's no way to bill for an electronic version easily; it takes a major amount of effort to set up a billing system. Then there is the risk of non-publication, and the need to refund. I think that per-issue billing is out of the question entirely; last time I checked, doing that type of thing via credit card (that's the only realistic way to do it) is too expensive, both in terms of transaction fees for the publisher, and initial setup for the publisher. An electronic newsletter that could be subscribed to in a printed form at a potentially large margin vs. cost would probably be best. This would let the "early adopters" take the hard copy, and pay the overhead for doing the initial low volume, with the costs coming down as the volumes went up. It certainly worked for Motorola with cell phones, and it's how Linux Journal started. So, as a tentaive shot: 1) A monthly print copy of Daemon News 2) Subscription rate based on print costs and non-bulk publication costs 3) A clause that non-publication does not result in a refund, so long as 3 or more issues have been published in a 12 month period Frankly, we collected user group fees at our Amiga user group back in the mid 80's, and we published a monthly news letter just from this small fund. We eventually had several local advertisers (people who sold Amigas or Amiga software, printers, disks, and the like) , and were able to repurpose the funds. This was with a user group of 45 or so people. As an alternate approach to the 3 steps above, you could do the same thing with a sufficiently large BSD user group: 1) Have optional membership fees 2) Strongly encourage fee payment (BayLISA does this now: fee payment is mildly mandatory after attending 2 meetings, and you can't sit on the board or hold an elected office unless you are paid up, but you can pay up after being elected and not declining to serve) 3) Fund a newsletter "just for the group" 4) Offer subscriptions to the local user group news letter, via the web, for a membership share + postage premium (e.g. if yearly dues were $24.00, then the news letter could be offered for $2.00 + postage per issue -- probably a lot less, if the entirety of the fees did not end up going to publication) 5) Branch out to a larger publication, as funding and readership goes up There's litterally dozens of viable variations on either of these approaches. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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