Comment by gortok

Comment by gortok 15 hours ago

7 replies

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I think this is great. I love this.

I immediately went to the menu to see how I could buy a subscription, and there isn’t a place, as far as I can tell through my search, to do so.

This goes for all new startups (non-profit or not!) if you want me to give you money, make it easy for me to give you money.

This is an online magazine, ostensibly, and as such I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.

gynvael 4 hours ago

Hi, project lead here :)

I fully agree with you. We are slooowly working towards having also the printed version available in a subscription model (note: PDFs will remain free and we will also continue to give out free - as in "sponsored by [some company or event]" - on conferences / demoscene parties / etc). We still have to do a couple of things first, like:

1. Make sure our prints are consistently of good quality. As we've learnt this year, printing is hard, especially if you have to support multiple different printing companies. We're well on our way with this.

2. Rebuild the older versions to have them print ready - this is required for e.g. ISSN registration which we are working on. As we don't do typical DTP, but rather use a waay more complex process of Python-scripts-processing-incoming-PDFs (perhaps this wasn't my brightest idea, but it has its upsides), this takes a while (mostly because older issues were built using previous build engine and PDFs are hard - our DTP programmer has a lot of horror stories).

3. Well, find a company (or multiple companies) that offers subscriptions and ships worldwide and test them.

So it will still take a bit of time, but we'll get there :)

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Elidrake24 15 hours ago

There's an RSS feed that is exposed in the standard manner (link tag in head), precisely what you're looking for. They do not offer a paid subscription, just the option to 'buy' individual issues, which is also linked under every issue.

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  • gortok 15 hours ago

    That sort of friction is just enough to keep folks from giving money.

    And that’s not me saying this, there’s an entire cottage industry devoted to pricing and buying decisions, and how friction reduces revenue.

    If I take your suggestion to its logical conclusion, I would need to:

    1. Get an RSS reader (I don’t have one, haven’t used one since google reader shut down) 2. Subscribe to their RSS feed. 3. Remember to check my RSS reader. 4. Each 3-4 months (just long enough for it not to be a habit forming exercise), click on the link. 5. Put in my credit card information each time. 6. buy the issue.

    Or, I could use their “preferred” method:

    1. Subscribe to their email list. 2. Click the link every 3-4 months when an issue drops. 3. Put in my credit card information every 3-4 months? 4. Buy the issue.

    Each of these has far more friction in them than necessary, and hurts their overall goal, which is to make their magazine self-sustaining.

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    • doctoboggan 14 hours ago

      I think the magazine is not designed to be a product that is bought, but rather something that is given away for free. A lot of the verbiage on the website discusses various ways to get and reproduce the magazine for free. Most of the content is submitted with a creative content license.

      > I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.

      You are not expected to pay to get emailed as new issues come out. Just join this group (link found on FAQ page) and you will get notifications: https://groups.google.com/g/pagedout-notifications

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      • q3k 14 hours ago

        > I think the magazine is not designed to be a product that is bought, but rather something that is given away for free.

        Indeed - when you're in the right circles a free print copy of PagedOut will find its way to you.

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