With the recent news of the demise/resurrection of RMC on another thread, I was thinking…
I understand the costs associated with the publication of a physical magazine- preparing photo-ready art, images and text; printing production costs, and bulk delivery/mailing costs. Those can be translated into a production-cost-per-magazine dollar amount, from which a profitable subscription rate (by year/multi-year) can be established.
With digital publication, does not all the work (magazine art and text prep) occur “in-house” (or, most of it, at any rate) and then “publication” becomes an electronic matter of having subscribers pay to access the magazine? If so, then what greater costs (other than electric rates for running the servers and computer system maintenance) would be incurred beyond staff salaries (and attendant employee costs), with whom the actual issue production occurs, that would make digital subscriptions expensive and roughly equivalent to physical magazine ones?
I am not speaking only of model railroading, but other similar hobby/interest magazines.
I am not familiar with the economics of publishing, but it seems that digital would be far cheaper than paper.
The analogy would be to bank services- the costs of electronic monthly statements should be far less than printing and mailing paper ones, seeing as the equipment costs which maintains the electronic system is a small expense, relative to personnel and mailing costs associated with paper statement production.
I ask this in regard to the future publication of RMC- if it were to go digital (in transition over a year, let’s say), wouldn’t a lower subscription cost be a good marketing idea to bring it’s circulation numbers up in the process of rejuvenating the magazine?
I’m probably over the average age of people here, but digital isn’t all that. If your computer crashes, or WHEN it does, you will lose your “magazines” & whatever else you have digitized.
There is a revived interest in vinyl records because the compression in the MP3s can be heard if you have good ears.
people rushed out to get their pictures & slides digitized, not realizing that a CD or DVD will not last as long as the 100 yr. old picture they are “saving”.
Just heard last night that some actresses have been “exposed” because someone hacked into a personal account. There is no way to keep something private if it’s in the “Cloud”.
I predict that people will wise up & figure out that the most secure way to send a message is with a 49c stamp.
Got a little off subject, but that’s part of being a senior. I still like the magazine format, but agree with some other posters that a digital version should cost far less than paper. If I wanted to send out a notice to 100 people, digital would cost next to nothing while paper would cost $49 plus paper & envelopes.
While it may seem that a digital version of a magazine is less expensive, a lot of the cost as similar. There are publication costs that are specific to a printed publication, but then there are ‘costs’ that are specific to electonic media.
I did an electronic newsletter for my company before I retired. This was delivered as web content and we had to do a lot of ‘testing’ every time a web browser was ‘upgraded’. This meant 3 formats for the then current browsers, testing when Java changed, and adding support for tablets/readers. This ate up about 2 hours/day.
MRH is web delivered, and there is no security/subscription issues to deal with. MR & RMC have to do a ‘print’ publication and also do a ‘digital’ delivered version via an ezine reader service(another cost). There are a lot of hours invested in getting all of those formats working. It is not just a simple file transer to the end user.
Back in the bad old days when civilian use of the internet was a new, the American Chemical Society studied the costs of paper and digital scientific journals. Most of the costs associated with high quality publishing are editing, manuscript preparation, and other types of knowledge work. The actual costs of printing, mailing, and cataloging were actually quite small compared to the total spent on each issue.
Magic Fact. Advertisers are willing to pay a good deal more for print ads than for Internet ads. Turn a printed magazine into a web site and watch your ad revenue plummet. Dunno why this is true, but it is. The newspapers discovered this when they started offering the paper on line. People stopped buying the paper, and advertisers stopped running ads.
Magic Fact #2. Consumers expect web content to be free. They won’t pay a subscription fee.
If the publication cannot do a printed edition, it becomes a hobby rather than a business.
Some other costs will include buying/developing a system to keep track of your digital subscribers and what issues they have paid for. Depending on your success you may need to upgrade your equipment and/or Interent connection service to handle the additional load.
I’ve noticed that the add on cost for digital is very low vs digital only. So at least you can both without paying a lot more.
Personally I like print. But I did buy the MR dvd of back issues which I have found very easy to use and much easier to store than paper issues - I have about 65 years worth of back issues that the dvd replaces. While I have space for them now, I won’t move them again.
I prefer to read the printed word than sit looking at a computer screen to read the same thing - its a generation thing I guess - sometimes change can be not so easy.
Given a choice between a paper copy of a magazine and a digital alternitive with the subscription prices being the same or similar then I would go with paper.
Other, probably younger modelers or subscribers, will latch onto the digital version like a duck to water not so easy fof this old drake tho.
If that’s what makes you feel better, please continue.
BUT a majority of your post is filled with untruths and fiction, you will not lose your mags as MR and RMC are accessed online.
I take precautions to back up my data, not really too difficult or expensive and I have no real concern with hackers as I take steps to protect myself.
Education eliminates fear and ignorance, but keep on collecting that paper, whatever works for you.
Reading is a very personal thing, but let me offer my own perspective. I was skeptical about moving to the digitl edition, too. Then I tried it. Consider:
The subscription is delivered digitally. If something happens to your computer, you just download them again.
I read digital magazines in landscape format on a 10" tablet. I can zoom in far closer on my tablet than I can in the print edition, which is great for these old eyes. My tablet currently has 56 issues of Trains and MR, 30 or so issues of MRH, and 4 years worth of Time magazine. Try carrying that around or storing it. The tablet compares favorably with one magazine for portability (a little smaller, but heavier). I can use my tablet anywhere I could read a magazine. If my wife is asleep, I can even read it with the lights out!.
I can navigate around the digital edition far more quickly than i can in the paper one, and can also link directly to a manufacturer’s or advertiser’s web site.
I used to get my paper copy right around the first of the month. I get the digital one around the 21st (10 days earlier).
I don’t even get the hard copy anymore.
Incidentally, the digital magazines are like a PDF file, not a website. Advertising looks just like it does in the printed version. I can no more ignore it in the digital version than I can in the printed one.
The actual storage medium can become unreadable over time. CDs can delaminate or suffer UV damage or all sorts of things. Their lifespans are somewhere between five and 200 years, depending on how the disc was made, what type, and so on. Drives fail and the platters become unreadable without the sort of investment in technical skill that only law enforcement is willing to undergo. Or the software to read it becomes unavailable.
Conversely, and I think people really misunderstand this, once you have the digitized version, you can much more readily defend the picture (or whatever) from loss or damage because you can make more than one. My dad is digitizing his slides from his Navy days because just keeping them in a box in the house wasn’t cutting it. Plus he didn’t have a projector so he couldn’t even look at them anyhow. But now there’s multiple copies of them and they’re actually free of “this drive will fail” because there’s more than one device that has a copy. The actual storage medium is irrelevant. That they are stored in a format that cannot be altered by the conditions they are stored in is the key.
I too am of the frame of mind that digital is not better. If MR went digital then I would end my subscription, it just wouldn’t be for me.
i am one who has gone back to buying vinyl records and think they are better than digital music. Photos on the computer are not the answer to longevity as already mentioned by others. Frankly I would prefer to spend less time on the computer.
I am a younger modeler, and I love to read on paper versus a computer screen. I have a large bookcase full of books, and a stack of old MRRs. I do read somethings on a computer, but nothing that long. I wouldn’t get the digital subscription.
I believe that there are several gazillion photo portraits and potential historical scenes out there that are stored in cameras, I-phones, tablets, and on the cloud (whatever that is) that will never see the light of day. This is because it is easy to accumulate this stuff and store it, but there is absolutely no documentation describing what has been recorded and where it is stored.
Further, at some period in time the stored photos will become non-relevant because the future generation will not care. Take your Dad’s navy photos. I’m sure they bring back memories for him. Have you looked at them? When you have kids do you think they’ll want to search the digital void looking for grandpops navy photos? Now if your dad had a few of the better photos printed as pictures using a real photographic process (not the bubblejet printer variety) and made up an album with some documentation as to who, what, where, and when, I think that might have a much better chance of surviving from one generation to the next.
Wedding photos are an example of this. Back some 38 years ago we had wedding photos taken and an album made up. I confess that I haven’t looked at it recently, but it is there if we want to. On the other hand my son’s wedding photos were all digital. We were handed a thumb drive with the photos on it and told that we could get the ones we liked pri
I have around 30% of our family photos digitised. They sit on about 4 different storage devices to avoid loss. They are displayed on 3 digital photo frames (including one with a 15" screen) so all the family can see them as often as they like. We have a plan ove the winter to complete the scanning process.
I take MRH and enjoy reading it in landscape format but take MR in paper as I like to relax in an armchair with it and find that paper for a magazine like that is better. I read ALL of my books on a Kindle and avoid paper books as I like reading in bed with a low light and a Kindle does that for me.
Hence I am a bit of a mix. I have to say, though, that about 10 years ago I got rid of about 15 linear feet ofMR from my garage. I realised that I was never going to wade through all of those magazines to get to a single article - and they were starting to smell of old paper! I am hoping that the reviews of MRs DVD archive improve with their forthcoming surprise so that I can justify buying it. There are too many mentions of search problems etc. with the new one.
OP: As Jack Benny used to say, “WELL”! My first query was the pricing issue of print versus digital subscriptions. This was nominally addressed in some initial posts, but the thread has diverged from that to like and unlike commentary on digital media.
Nittany Lions’s statement “Their lifespans are somewhere between five and 200 years, depending on how the disc was made, what type, and so on. " is interesting. I don’t expect to be around more than another 30-35 years, and by then, subscriptions will be “beamed” into neural connections implanted in reader’s heads, for all I know. Aside from than, we already have issues with antique digital files on floppy discs that can no longer be read by virtually all contemporary machines- unless you jerry-rig an old 3.5” floppy drive to work with your current computer. In 20 years, 3d matrix laser-read memory cubes may be the standard, so how would those (by then) old CD and DVD discs be read?
Well, aside from being a digital media reader (MRH), it is still the cost issues I don’t understand. At work, I posted homework online (our electronic gradebook) and all of my “wunderkind” computer-saavy students were complaining that I didn’t print out the assignment (go figure!). I try to save paper by being “electronic”- and I am not getting paid more to do so, so… how is it that digital subscriptions will be increasingly expensive, when the “infrastructure” which delivers content to the reader is less costly personnel and materials-wise, than would be the case if delivered in print hard copy form?
I only store the magazines which have articles/content which I might someday use. The rest are given to my public library in attempts to promote the hobby to others and the youth. How would you do this with a digital subscription?
I don’t want to recieve my magazines digitally! I like the fact that my hard copies are taken where ever I want them and available. Y-Fi connections are tenuous at best out in the world, their band width, chewed up by people streaming video.
I’m old hat and sick and tired of the technology changing at an ever increasing rate, give me my hard copy and keep them coming!