PAPER READER STILL ALIVE

February 15, 2009

Downloadable Web Reader can be found here, but:

We'll still have the paper one. It will cost $4 and will be available (read John's post in the News section). Can't emphasize this enough--'twill still be available in paper.

In "the old days," we'd get 20,000 or 25,000 of them  printed, and it would cost $15,000. Then we'd mail them out, about 7,800 of them at $1 each---so each printing and mailing would cost $22K or more, with no paid advertising to help out. Try to do that 2 to 4 times a year, why don'tcha?  It hurt us a lot, and we can't do that any more. If you pine for paper, you'll pay for paper--just like you'd pay at a newsstand. On the other hand, you can read it free online in color. Don't write and pine for the good old days. Read the early part of the paragraph to see how "good" they were.

The new way makes more sense. Free color on the web, and wiith PDFs you can zoom in and get close without it going fuzzy....it's quite nice.

Still I'm a paper guy myself, and I as much as any-o'-you like holding a self-contained publication in my hand and paging through it. It's not a totally brown  proposition, either, since it's printed on recycled paper. The printing industry is greener than it used to be, inkwise. And printers are hurting a lot these days, and they need work, too.

So we sort of go both ways. If you want the paper, you pay for  it $4. That will come close to covering our cost. Since we'll print fewer, the price per Reader will be higher (about $2 to us). They'll head your way in an envelope--another $0.35 or so, and with about $1.39 postage--- not sure yet what that'll be, but I'll change this sentence when I find out Monday). The time spent producing it....we don't count it. So $4 is a good price for now.

Main point: Paper lives still.  I'm still editing it, and we won't catch all the typos, and there will be sentences that'll make me cringe when I see them, but it'll at least be out, and then we'll start working on 42.

Thank you all for being patient, and thanks especially for wanting it and liking it. It puts pressure on, but I want to like it, too, and we try to put in things we want to read about...and I think we all have about the same taste.

The fish story I wrote many years ago. My oldest daughter illustrated it two years ago...it's not relevant to bikes, but you hear a lot about fly-fishing, and there are so many books and how-to's about it, and there's all this artsy mystery and latin bug names and a pecking order, and  it's just gotten so weird in the past 20 years. Before I was a bike guy, I was a fly-fisherman, and I was really good at it---good at catching really hard-to-catch fish. I did a ton of it from age 11 to 24 or so, and now I ride bikes and work here and have a family and an inconvenient fear of driving that keeps me off the water...but when I do fish, I still love it. So--that's why the fish story.

Grant