Hacker Monthly, a printed magazine version of Hacker News.
hackermonthly.com
hackermonthly.com
I'd make that a weekly, published on Friday morning.
I suspect that the print aspect might be nice locally but disseminating a weekly publication worldwide will offset the niceness of print. The iPad/Kindle wave is coming - ride it, don't avoid it. Time to pivot.
There's an obvious question about comments... perhaps you can take the best comments from each post and ask the author for the right to republish - or even just republish and hopefully/probably nobody will sue you, or even ask pg to change the terms&conditions to grant an irrevocable license to HN to use the comments as you see fit, followed by an authorisation by HN for you to use the comments as you see fit.
Apart from that, there's also the question of how you'll select the articles. Presumably votes aren't enough by themselves, if you want to publish content that's "timeless" you'll have to do some selection. What kind of stuff will end up there? Erlang articles? Start-up wisdom? Scalability tricks? It seems to me that HN pumps out enough content on a weekly basis to produce at least a handful of such themed collections... not sure what the solution is there, but worth thinking about.
There are only a few good, innovative, really interesting articles on HN per month.
The more I think about it, in fact, the more I like the idea. If he could provide some of the top comments, I would LOVE to read this magazine at the end of the month and read about some of the stuff I will undoubtedly have missed or just overlooked.
I second the above post, go for it and see what happens!
Link. Summarize. Add insight.
Present the article link, summarize. Present the discussion link, summarize the major points/concerns/counterpoints raised in the thread. Present any relevant external posts about the subject.
Having the benefit of a month and the full breadth of the discussion and potentially other posts around the web on the topic, you have an opportunity to add truly valuable insight and analysis to the topic -- the sorts of things that even fervent readers of HN might find value in.
When everything you publish is either a link or your own words, copyright doesn't enter into it.
That said: I think dead-tree format, in and of itself, is your biggest roadblock to success. It dramatically boosts your costs and headaches. It will select out quite a bit of your possible readership. There are non-trivial economic reasons why the dead-tree industry is struggling and it has little to do with the content itself.
I like reading on paper much better than in the browser, enough that I would be able to hold off spending too much time reading the internet to avoid spoiling the fun of reading in in the print edition. I already do that with a few other magazines.
I'm a little torn about my HN reading habits- HN has been incredibly educational for the ~1.5 years I've spent here, but it can very easily become a huge time sink. Your proposal just might be the ideal compromise.
I'd also appreciate a hackernews-to-rss which actually embedded the body of the article AND the comments, which you could maybe do as a related service. If it were properly paginated to work well on various mobile devices, especially synced to work with no online connectivity during reading, it would be great. iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle would be great targets.
I think ignoring copyright is the way to go.
Sure, creative work recorded to some medium is protected by copyright - however, transcribed discussion is not by the standard measure, "creative," (i.e. derived for some rational and/or aesthetic purpose, such that it has the ability to be appreciated and admired on its own merits, for its own sake.)
I say publish the comments consequences be damned. If any commenter has issue with their words being published hardcopy, they will have a hell of a time trying to justify why they wrote them in a public forum in the first place.
In any case, given the indignation that is ever-present here when a software I.P. story gets posted, at least you will have outed the hypocrites among us... ;)
First, "I want to speak next!" isn't copyrightable. Copyright is there to protect things of value. "I want to speak next!" isn't anything of value. You realize this yourself, so I wonder why you asked the question in the first place.
However, you make the mistake of assuming "where" you publish your work is any indication of value. Indeed, the really good comments are usually well written, and do add value. You'd also be hard pressed to demonstrate that comments are merely transcribed discussion. Comments are just the label we've assigned to the posts we make here.
So each comment must be weighed on it's own merits. A comment can be valued, can be "creative". Indeed, one could argue that the desire to include quality comments in a publication could be indicative of it's quality.
Now, I see your point. Essentially, commenting is the 21st century version of a discussion. Reporters are allowed to report what people said. What people said can be reported. A discussion or commenting forum should be considered in the same way. I don't think copyright works like that.
Is there anything out there where this has been tested?
Good post, btw. Got me thinking. =)
If the copyright issues discussed throughout this thread don't make it clear enough, think through it logically.
Does it seem ok for someone to republish your original writing for money without asking your permission first?
That said, I do feel this "Hack Monthly" project should play nice and respect comment "owners".
Any owner of rights can give such rights up in part while still retaining ownership of the materials by giving a license to someone else to use such materials for specified purposes. For example, I might submit an article to a journal under terms where I retain the copyright while giving them a license to publish the article once in their journal.
With comments, there is no express license involved but rather an implied one. If I have impliedly agreed that the site can display my comment under its customary policies, the law treats that as an implied license (i.e., an implied granting of a permission) for the site owner to display such comment under its customary terms and, if such terms include a practice by the site owner of making such submissions irrevocable, I impliedly agree to that as well when I make my submission.
The law can get murky in these areas but this is a basic analysis of how you can retain ownership while still giving up certain rights to the site owner.
My own personal attitude when I post something is that I don't own it. Since I lose most controls associated with traditional ownership, it helps me sleep better to not draw a fine legal argument and just assume I don't really own my comments. But of course, I don't post anywhere but HN, so I also make an assumption about pg and the community's attitude of what is the right thing to do.
HN lacks an API, but a decent web scraper (like BeautifulSoup) should be able to walk the DOM and grab the top threads.
Depending on space restrictions in the print edition, this could comprise:
* All comment threads with a score above some threshold;
* Only the top thread;
* The best one-third of comments;
etc.
I would ask PG to change the TOS of hacker news, to allow you do this. I think he'd like it, so he may be willing.
Comments add value to a site, making it attractive to advertisers. That's the exchange. Asking contributors to also allow the site owner to re-use their contributions for other purposes crosses a line for me.
> And what effect might this have on the people willing to comment?
You incorrectly (to my mind) assume that this is a major problem for most people. I think there won't be any effect. People don't read T&Cs, though we make it explicit in them that we do this.
This isn't like Facebook changing their T&Cs. This is publicly posted information, not private correspondence between friends. That would be very different.
> Comments add value to a site, making it attractive to advertisers. That's the exchange.
That's not the exchange, just your perception of it.
Therefore, a submission or comment posted online would be protected by copyright provided that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. The copyright would belong to the author and not to the site on which the comment or submission is posted. This is why many terms of use for sites that invite third-party submissions, comments, etc. provide that, in making a submission, a third party assigns all copyright to the owner of the site, who is then free to use the material as he likes without further say from the submitter. Without such terms of use, the submitter (i.e., the author) would retain the right to object to any other use being made of the submission besides the post itself as submitted by that person.
Two major doctrines modify the above.
First, by making the submission, the author of the comment gives at least an implied license for display on the site and for incidental copying that goes along with it.
Second, fair use might allow otherwise copyrighted material to be quoted in limited ways.
Given the above, I believe permissions would be needed to re-publish in magazine format any comments or other materials that reflect any degree of creativity. The magazine sounds like a great idea, though, and the problem is likely more logistic than anything, as I assume few if any contributors would not give permission if asked.
http://www.whois.net/whois/hackernews.com
Registered 1998.
More likely it's because I dont know the format, so what would be helpful is maybe an example magazine?(yes we like free stuff)
I really dont want to read alot, so summaries are important as well as categories. I personally, dont like news about Apple(iPad), IBM, microsoft etc. But I like to hear what is new for founders, or an interesting blog post. So, it might be good to separate it along some lines.
I think it's a good idea, and i'd subscribe if my country was supported.
The opinions expressed in this thread are going to be biased towards the negative because you're missing out on that important audience segment. I would say probably your best marketing angle with this is to send out tons of free copies to tech conferences to stuff into goodie bags. That's your exact target audience of people.
Also, if this gets off the ground, a yearly, self-published Best of Hacker News 20XX would also be something I think has a lot of appeal.
But, I think, the crucial thing that will make this a success is the taste of the editor. Don't go by upvotes or mass popularity, otherwise, what's the point of having a human in the process. Really unearth those undiscovered gems and occasional moments of brilliance and never let the quality flag or you'll be done.
On copyright issues- I do not know why anyone on HN would worry about someone reprinting their comments. The minute you put them online is the minute you said "redistribute". Someone would really need to be a hater to complain about it.
On your experience- Nothing trumps the passion that drives a need to solve a problem.
On the business model- It would be interesting to see the numbers.
The slick and weighty Bookmarks (http://www.bookmarksmagazine.com/) magazine may be worth looking at as it does something similar with book reviews: gathering, compiling, summarizing, adding commentary, etc.
Subscribed out of curiosity, not because of a need since I love reading HN daily.
will I ever buy it as print version, I doubt
(1) make it smaller its ridiculously big, i understand that this style is hip nowadays, buts its also ugly and patronizing
(2) add more white an grey, kinda like the original hacker news site, orange is just one line on the top
But if it really gone big (a lot of people ordered the printed version), we certainly can devote a percentage of revenue towards planting trees.
It takes energy to produce trees, cut them down, make paper, transport paper, print magazines, distribute magazines, throw away magazines and then (hopefully) recycle it.
This isn't a solved problem. Far from it. Why not just distribute it digitally.
I think printing yesterday's news on a piece of dead tree, transporting it and then selling it is a stupid idea...
Actually, coming back to the trees for paper-making, you can add to the downsides that usually the trees are fast-growing (e.g. eucalyptus), not 'nobler' woods (even humble pines are too slow). And the mills do smell a bit - in a particular highway route, I can tell when I'm driving past one mill I can't see. On the other hand, the process does capture carbon from CO2 ...
P.S. A good argument can be made that 'wasting resources' is the basis of human civilization, without which we'd be living in caves and frugally feeding on berries. Check out what happened because of luxuries like silk and condiments like pepper ...
Second, once the revenue comes in, I will start delegating jobs to other people, until the point where I don't do most of the work.
And you are right. I will probably have to do all the hard work for the first few issues. But hopefully, ONLY for the first few issues.
-1 more for being 100% unnecessarily wasteful, and I'm really not liking the idea.
That seems delusional. You don't even have a mock up or anything yet to show advertisers. You haven't even worked out how you'll get permission for the content.