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MagCloud

2008-06-23 15:52:22.846895+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

MagCloud "...enables you to publish your own magazines. All you have to do is upload a PDF and we'll take care of the rest: printing, mailing, subscription management, and more."

Half of me wants to say "Oh, look, the customization of manufacturing is finally arriving", the other half of me wants to say "It's like writing an HTML viewer for a BBS", the fact that the concept can exist makes it obsolete.

We're letting all of our magazine subscriptions expire in favor of online ones.

[ related topics: Software Engineering Writing ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2008-06-23 16:01:14.660596+00 by: ebradway

One day a week, I spend two hours, each way, on a bus commuting to Denver. I read my magazines on the bus... Again, until the electronic reader gets much, much better, I'll still read as much on dead trees as I do online.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-06-23 16:25:01.426694+00 by: Dan Lyke

So it'd seem likely to me that you'd use a service like this to print completely customized content, rather than using it to fit into the existing magazine model.

If it's truly print-on-demand, then printing the same thing for each consumer seems very silly.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-06-23 19:05:52.93545+00 by: dexev

Media are about group identification as much as information or entertainment. This is probably more true about magazines than newspaper, television, or movies.

#Comment Re: made: 2008-06-23 23:08:26.39855+00 by: mkelley

It's not just magazines. I used the HP Indigos at my old job to print those carpet sample books you see at Home Depot. They're neat little machines, upload a csv file and tagged PDF and *poof* you have variable data printing. This is the same system, the Moo.com folks use to print from Flickr...Think mail merge, just on a larger scale.