Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pavs | Hacker News Reader

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I will have to admit, I was skeptical about the idea when it was discussed here first and now I can see real value in it. Its true that discussion on these topics adds value to the contents and that is what makes a community unique. The discussions.

But sometimes I just want to read the content, not get distracted by anything else.

Two suggestions for future releases.

1) Can you reprint at least the top 3-5 comments on those topics on hackers News? (not sure how you are going to do that without making a lot of people mad). Also on the PDF version, can you have a clickable link to the discussion on the hacker news?

2) One of the biggest reasons I am turned off from reading magazines is the annoying ads all over the place including in-between the content. Since you are going to rely on ad, may I suggest that you try to avoid ads on the same page, where there is content? I stopped reading Wired Magazine, just because of this reason.

Good luck. Looks good.

I think the ads were fine.

I think the reason he did not include comments is the lack of a way of contacting people on HN. Very few people include an email address in their profile.

HN could help him a lot by adding a "email me" link on the profile page - not an email address, but a forwarder, HN will send the email.

I don't think spam would be much of a problem since you would need to be a registered user to send an email, and you could require 3 karma or something.

Perhaps instead HN could adopt a Creative Commons license for comment text; that way no permission would be needed, and it seems like the Right Thing anyway.

Oh I agree, the current ads are fine, I just hope they stay that way and don't infiltrate the contents in the future. Think of it as a pre-emptive suggestion. :)

I would definitely support an email me link, or perhaps a way to include an email field which is only visible to other registered users of HN. I don't want to give my email to just anyone, but I don't mind listing it for HN users.

Limiting by whether or not a user has spent 30 seconds creating a HN account seems pointless.

Maybe only show emails to users with 25 karma or more?

I like the email me forwarder idea as well. I have wanted to contact fellow readers in the past

I have to second the parent on the comment comment. :) I've seen this done superbly in Snob magazine (www.snob.ru), which is a relatively recent Russian-language project also featuring both an online community (subscribers only) and traditional printed issues. I think it's a very interesting model for the new media, and Snob executes it very well.

In any case, what they do is they have a few pages in the printed edition where they just reprint interesting comments from the online discussion. The comments are shown as thought bubbles next to user icons from the online community, and they are selected such that they make sense standalone without the original article text. These pages are surprisingly fun to browse, and they also work as an ad for the online portion of the magazine and the discussions taking place there.

I was on the same boat - I didn't see any added value nor did I think people would give him permission to reprint. After reading the PDF though I stand corrected on both. Great job putting the material in a very readable format. I was actually fun reading through each article again, even though I think I had read most of them online.

It makes me think that the limitations of printed material, both the delay and content limits (# of pages) is really not a big deal when it comes to the stuff we enjoy here on HN. In fact, it really was nice to only have a small number of articles in front of me so I didn't get distracted with all the noise.

Lastly, I thought not having comments would be huge... but I didn't think about that once as I was reading the PDF. I guess the context of how you consume something defines what you expect.

Or just add a link to the HN thread?

Indeed, I missed a couple of these articles along the way and it was great to not have missed them completely. I wonder if this format has even more potential for communities who don't spend as much time on the internet, where even more of the content would be fresh to them. A future for publishing?

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