A surprisingly common misconception about Paged Out! is that we have some super strict acceptance policy. In reality we almost never reject articles and try to work with authors to improve them if there's any need for that ;)
But if you feel worried, our Discord is open, and you can also just email us with an article topic idea and we'll give you feedback on it.
Yeah, we need to onboard more Print-on-Demand providers - perhaps some with easier purchase flow (this said, I have to give it to lulu that they have solid customer support, at least in my experience).
But - per your edit - the PoD option is for folks who either really want a printed Paged Out!, or want to throw some money into the project. This year we got back to finding sponsors to pay for prints to distribute them (for free) on various events - https://pagedout.institute/?page=event-prints.php - and we plan to keep increasing our presence at more events next year. So the "in the right circles" just means "one of these events".
Anyway, whichever way you choose to enjoy Paged Out! - bought, received for free, or just the PDF version - glad to have you with us :)
It's in progress, but we need to rebuild all older issues (to include publisher information on the editorial page as requested by the Swiss ISSN authority). And, because some of them were made when we still had the old build engine, there are technical issues we need to solve first before we can rebuild them ;). I expect we'll get the ISSN either near the end of this month or early next though.
"If you would like to sell printed copies of Paged Out!, please contact us about a commercial license [...]. We're happy to work both with very small sellers who print and bind Paged Out! at home, [...]"
ETA: Though admittedly I wouldn't count on buying a yacht for money earned this way ;). Our income from "official" (lulu.com) sales are about 30-300 CHF / month, and this is only because a lot of wonderful people want to support us and get the more expensive "sponsorship" editions.
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 :)
As I said, this magazine is wonderful. One caution I have, taking what you said that you only intend to charge for prints, is that I don’t think it’s a great idea to self-devalue the PDF version by not charging for it as well.
1. Visit the site and get it free.
2. Subscribe, get the PDF delivered to your inbox and discount on printed version.
That way, you give folks an easy on-ramp to paying you while still giving out the free version.
What you're saying makes sense and it's a good idea. It's not fully directly applicable to Paged Out! though due to certain assumptions we've made with our base operating model.
I.e. our intention is to charge readers neither for PDF nor for print, to the extent that is possible. In case of print-on-demand or print-subscription that of course won't be possible, but at various events we're successfully bringing printed Paged Out! issues to distribute for free. The idea is rather for the zine to finance itself through ad sales, sponsorship editions, and special collector bundled editions. We have a couple of other more-typical ideas as well, like Pateron later on.
Admittedly, so far we're in the red (not terribly though), but that's OK. There are still certain things we need to roll out before being able to evaluate whether we need to change the base operating model. If we do have to change it, it's not unlikely to start with ideas like the one you proposed - they do make sense.
If you're looking for recommendations for other zines, here are two (though both TXT format):
- https://phrack.org/ - well, this one you probably have heard about ;) (it has a printed form as well, but I think you have to actually find it on an event)
But if you don't mind older content in amazing artistic forms, do check out old demoscene zines like Hugi: https://www.hugi.scene.org/ (note: these are in form of EXE files - that was pretty typical for scene zines)
- https://phrack.org/
- https://tmpout.sh/
- https://www.hugi.scene.org/
- https://lainzine.org/archive
- https://inteltechniques.com/magazine.html
- https://n-o-d-e.net/zine/
- https://increment.com/issues/
- https://pocorgtfo.hacke.rs/
Not all of them are active though.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46134188
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130469
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