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Comment by mikesaunders | Hacker News Reader

Some people want hard-copy magazines. Many thousands of them, in fact! And as for "a crap-ton of money to make a bunch of PDFs", it's far more involved than that. See the FAQ on the Indiegogo page.

When you take into account editorial contributors (£100 per page, or £4,400 per issue), design and art help (£2,900 per issue), hardware, bills, app store charges etc., it all adds up.

So it's not just a "bunch of PDFs" -- it's a complicated collaboration between writers, artists and stores. We want to make it good value, but we're not just reproducing some HOWTOs. We're making new, original, creative content.

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My point was that it's not environmentally desirable to produce magazines.

Seeing as you have a uniquely digitally inclined audience, a shortage of funds and a global market, PDFs do make a lot more sense.

I didn't mean to devalue any potential content.

Your costs are very high. There's no reason you need London overheads for an English magazine on technical content. For example, I know many first language, highly literate, technical English speakers who with extensive writing experience would be happy to edit such content at much cheaper rates than 100GBP per page. For example, 10 GBP per page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_inequality

People can buy digital subscriptions if they don't want to use paper. But some people want hard-copy magazines, and it's not wrong for us to offer them. We will do our best to use sustainable paper sources and responsible printers.

As for the costs, those are normal in the publishing world. Many magazines have tried slashing the contribution per-page cost, and ended up with poor quality content as a result. We want the best contributors, and they're worth paying for.

100GBP per page may seem like a lot, but that's for 800 words of highly technical content, that has to be correct, well-written, informative and entertaining. A single page can take many hours of work when you're dealing with advanced subjects. You get what you pay for.

Thought experiment. Consider the possibility that you are an anachronism, extending itself until it runs out of resources to feed on, and that your grandchildren will fail to understand your insensitivity to the now obvious issue of vanishing forests and biodiversity. Any chance that's true?

If we succeed, and promote free software, it will mean a lot fewer obsolete Windows PCs going into landfill sites. Our grandchildren will cherish our memory.

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