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26 comments

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Alex3917
I'm not quite sure I get it. What am I supposed to do with all of my magazines? Give them to friends? Sell them?

It would be cool if you could get a contract with Starbucks/Borders to put the most popular magazines in the store each month. That way it would give users an incentive to create. Granted, getting distribution like that would be quite difficult.

sankaman
It sounds more like you create a magazine with just the content you want from the blogs that you like. Shelfmade then prints and mails you that magazine and you can read it offline. Perhaps for a long overseas flight or something like that. Could be cool if it catches on.
mikesabat
Thanks for the comment.

Users get paid when people shelv their articles and they spread ideas - same incentives as blogging.

Of course we would love to be in retail eventually, and it may be possible. I think the cooler aspect is that you can subscribe to the magazine that PG builds (eventually) or you can build a magazine for your employees to read.

Instead of Chris Anderson choosing what articles are important this month, you can subscribe to Noah Kagan's or a friend from college's magazine.

Alex3917
To be honest the idea itself doesn't seem especially sexy or exciting to me, although if it's well executed I could see myself using it. It seems novel enough to be worth a try.

That being said, I'm not sure how easy it will be to translate blog posts into print in a way that's visually appealing. A lot of bloggers are big into using whitespace, which would look pretty weird in a print medium. And often there is meaning conveyed by the whitespace itself, so it's not necessarily easy to reformat posts into nice paragraphs.

mikesabat
Hey Alex, If I'm understanding you correctly, the answer is that we aren't printing web pages - blogs. We are taking the text, reformatting and putting the content into a magazine layout. We're not simply clicking print and binding.
uuilly
The long tail for magazines? Sounds cool but I'm worried about a contradiction... Yes the market for tree based magazines is still HUGELY HUGE and you could make a lot of money creating lots of special interest mags the big guys ignore. But... If your audience is web-savy enough to discover your service, they probably get most of their news from the web and they don't care about magazines.

Your ideal customer would be web-savy but their end subscribers would not be. I'm too absorbed in the www to imagine who that may be, but I'm sure they're out there. On news.yc though, you'll probably get a bunch of people saying "why not just read a blog?"

Godspeed.

mikesabat
Understood and I definitely agree - to a point. I get ALL my news and entertainment online. Sometimes I just need to get away from the computer screen.

I read Seth Godin's blog everyday, but I still bought Small Is the New Big. I still bought and read The Long Tail although half the book was online.

joe
Being the constantly proofreading sort, I'm not sure why you're capitalizing random words and phrases, like "Print" and "On Demand".

Also, I really didn't want to fill in my name, email, and URL, but I clicked the "Yes!" box to see what would happen. Now I have an overlay window occupying the center of my screen, with no way to get rid of it save by entering the aforementioned info. That's annoying.

Now that that's out of the way, one question: Will people actually pay for this? I mean, pretty much the only time I read a print magazine is if I'm really bored at the airport. Otherwise, the Web is all I need.

myoung8
Agreed in full.

Nice design, though.

mikesabat
Known and working on it. Sorry.
sankaman
Seems the issue is fixed. Nice Job!
mikesabat
When I first let the text out to a few people the first question was always, "So is this an actual print magazine?" That is why print is capitalized.
adnam
Ahh, a fellow baker ;-)
inklesspen
This yellow card inviting me to sign up to your mailing list appears on top of the text I was reading, with no obvious way of dismissing it. So I closed the window.
mikesabat
Sorry, fixed
inklesspen
Nope, you didn't fix it. The slightly-tilted yellow card image (the one you click to get the actual form) still blocks my reading with no apparent way to dismiss it.
wastedbrains
Cool concept if you could get a partnership or two to print just all the highest rated articles each month that could be a cool magazine. I only buy mags when flying. I frequently wish I had some of the best posts printed out just for my eyes or to bring with me while waiting somewhere, reading in bed (laptops aren't comfortable)
mikesabat
This is what we are building the site for. Who decides the best posts? To start off, we are giving you the power to do that.

Once this becomes an option (receiving blog posts in print) it changes the way you surf. A 3 page article that looks cool, shelv it and go back to work. Guy Kawasaki interview that you want to read late, shelv it and go back to work. PG essay that you know you want to read again - shelv it.

The Internet become about finding great articles, and only reading the short ones.

german
looks good, here are my recommendations:

I like the folded corner in the right to go to the next page, but i have no way to go to the previous page (besides the back button in firefox), maybe you should add a previous folded corner in the left.

Another thing that I'm seeing is some overlapped text, just for curiosity I checked it with firebug and noticed that the footer has a -30 px margin top, you should change it, there is a lot of overlapped text, watch your negative margins and the position absolute of some elements.

Hope that helps.

mikesabat
Thanks gman. What browser were you viewing.
german
Firefox 2.0.0.6

If you need any help with CSS just ask =)

almost
I have no idea what it what it does and I can't be bother to read all that text. You should assume most people who come to your site will be like me and leave without ever even finding out what it is you do.
gscott
I knew a lawyer once who had a newsletter on gaming laws and casino's would subscribe at a cost of several hundred dollars a month. If you could hook up with these specialized newsletters that have high value and you can give the current newsletter a better presentation (remember the people writing these are not Quark express addicts) I think you could have a good business.

Also another idea is with meetup.com, they have a number of social groups who might be interested in a quarterly magazine that would be great for keeping memories in this digital world where pictures loose there context when stored in a directory, the only thing you have to keep the context is the directory name... and storage medias have a tendancy to fail or in case of media cards get lost.

gersteni
Have you thought about the IP issues? Printing out other people's content and putting it into a magazine is an obvious case copyright infringement.
mikesabat
Yep, it is opt in for publishers and we pay them every time someone grabs an article and puts it in the magazine.
curi
increase font size, observe breakage