Anyone notice the price increase on individual monthly issues? Looks like it increased by $2.00! Does anyone know what the subscription cost is now? If it reflects the News Stand price, I’m out of here!!
Buying over the counter would be $85.88 for 12 issues. Two years would be $171.86. I renewed my two year subscription a few months ago for $67.95. My two year subscription to Trains, also renewed a few months ago, was $77.98.
Many specialized magazines have had fairly high single issue prices for a long time now. They don’t have the circulation numbers to make it economical to sell for lower prices - thats just the reality of some magazines in the US.
Judging from what I saw last year in England, the environment for train magazines is MUCH bigger and there is a much larger circulation and a higher per capita of train fans. I don’t know why that is so, culture, maybe they are way behind the times regarding changing from hardcopy to electronic media or who knows, but I counted 37 different train related publications on a large wall of magazines in a store in England last December - 37!!! It might behoove the publishers of MR to do some research on England and see why the difference is so big - such a study could be enlightening and maybe help us here in the US. User, this is a big country and a small rudder will not turn things around quickly, but there must be a reason for this.
As for individual issues of MR, my local library fortunately carries it so I get to read it there.
It is not the price that bothers me, it is the fact that my LHS abd local drug store have no MR issues more recent than Oct. 2014.
This is in Oshawa, Ontario, in that great unkown blob on the map, north of USA.
Dave
I’m reminded of the first MR I bought - December 1955. I was 11 years old, and it was 50 cents! That was a pretty hefty price for a mag back then. Of course if you translated that to 2015 dollars, I suspect it would be pretty close to today’s cover price…
JerryL,
That price reflects the extra pages added to the March issue. April returns to the normal price.
Sincerely,
Neil Besougloff
editor
Phew!
Circulation and point of sale is down. Materials and labor costs are up. Whats the alternative to raising the cover price?
Go out of business [xx(]
Those were good pages, too.[:D]
Yeah, magazine rack sales are down like most other paper publishing formats. I would expect rate increases for subscriptions depend on postal costs, but they trend upward also.
I trust that MR will figure out the web-delivery things sufficiently to keep serving us. I’m pretty happy with my e-edition, especially since the wife handed down an iPad with a Retina display[8-|]. It’s now a third new wireless throttle on the layout, thanks to JMRI, so I can operate and browse the latest issue at the same…
You say that’s not a good idea? Well…[rumble, crash, bang!]…OK, bad idea, but darn convenient when you head for the crew lounge.[:o)]
In the 70’s, 80’s and 90"s, MR was regularly between 130 and 175 pages, and sometimes over 200.
Now 106 is a big deal…
As for electronic delivery - it has it pluses and minuses, but I still prefer a paper copy. I enjoy having the electronic archive and was happy to pay the extra subscription fee, but I don’t plan to get rid of my hard copies back to 1954 or so.
Sheldon
I absolutely dislike electronic magazines. I much prefer paper instead of a bright screen staring back at me. I use my tablet at home instead of the seldom used desktop, but I still don’t want electronic magazines! If MR went that route, I would no longer read it. Instead, I would just read the old paper ones over and over.
I sometimes wonder who they put in charge of some of the renewal stuff, I only renew at a certain price point which they offer me about every two years, you would think they would know that (maybe they do and just don’t care). For me MR is just an extra as I find print mags to be an issue with my eyesite.
Every so often, I have a lapse period of several months in my MR subscription, generally due to other, more pressing bills needing attention at the time of renewal. I used to go to my local Hobbytown store to get MR, where there was a kiosk of several hobby magazines, MR and Trains among them. Last fall, I found that the manager/owner had discontinued ALL of the magazines he previously had carried. Why? He told me that he was returning almost half of the quantity of each different publication to his news vendor each month following- even the RC magazines, where a majority of his sales (of RC car and airplane items) is presently focused. The ONLY place (now that Borders is long gone) to get ANY type of hobby magazine locally is Barnes and Noble.
I don’t know if this is a trend nationally among Hobbytown franchise holders, and there are no longer any other independent hobby stores in Tampa to check out for magazine availability.
If a hobby store isn’t inclined to carry hobby magazines, then…
Cedarwoodron
Well everything is going up all the time. I personally don’t mind that much if I feel I’m getting something for the money. I don’t mind spending money but I don’t like to just flush it down the toilet. With MR I don’t think I’m getting my moneys worth and haven’t felt that way for quite some time. Simplistic photo articles that are designed to sell stuff for Walthers and reviews with terrible, glaring errors don’t deserve an increase in subscription or individual magazine prices. Enough Pele and the UP too!
Now their drive is for the exclusive, extra cost video stuff and electronic pages. The written magazine is suffering, in my opinion, because of this stuff. I could see the quality deteriorate when they gave David Popp the video camera. The printed magazines started turning to crap with his loss. If that’s what you like then more power to you but when this subscription expires my money will go elsewhere. Probably another RRHS. Better bang for the buck.
The last time I said that I was blasted, so fire away, but when it all comes down to the ink on the check…if you aren’t getting something for the money it’s time to change the name you’re writing on the check! I give to charities but I don’t see Kalmbach as being a charity.
My 2¢,
Roger Huber
Deer Creek Locomotive Works
Why all the crying about the single issue price. Subscribe and get the mag for less than $3 per, delivered to your freaking door.
Just subscribing is almost always better for everyone. The publisher knows how many copies to print, and they are already bought. The reader just has to go pick up their mail which they all ready do, and they get it a month earlier.
Newstands are risker for the publisher, miscalculate the number of copies, and that is really bad for business, especially if they print too many, which eats into profits and could cost the company money.
The March issue did have a lot more content. I wish every issue was that size.
Personally, I wouldn’t get a digital subscription. I perfer reading on paper a lot more to reading off of a screen. Plus, paper is even better when reading in the evenings or at night. I might consider the all access pass if I had more time since I won’t have room to store all of the issues, plus computer databases are easier to search. However, I do keep my older issues that I already have, and I prefer reading them.
One thing I noticed about MRR is that they had really good videos about their older project layouts like Bay Junction and the Virginian, but recently the subscriber’s videos have declined, they just show a quick overview and a few details. It appears MRVP has been eatting into the MRR project layouts. I would prefer that they stay seperate, MRVP has their own project layouts. To be honest right now I don’t have the time to watch all of MRVP videos. However I would still like to see the MRR project layout, as an MRR subscriber.Maybe in the future I will subscribe to MRVP, but for now I will stick MRR.
I know all the major UK model rail magazines have digital editions, and I think the prototype magazines do as well.
MR has a digital edition. You can subscribe instead of or in addition to the paper edition.
Personally, I prefer paper.
Enjoy
Paul
Obviously, when you have only so much material per month & have 2 or 3 outlets, they all suffer. Now you have to subscribe to everything to get what you used to get in the magazine.
I will concede that they didn’t have video back in the day & I might subscribe if I along with others didn’t have slow un reliable DSL.
I also remember most of those pages was multiple page ads from several large mail order shops.In that Jurassic age period one could choose the better prices from those advertisers and either call the order in or send it by mail.Pease allow 4-6 weeks for deliverly! [;)]