[gynvael]

Hi, project lead here :)

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 :)

[gortok]

Thank you for following up.

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.

[gynvael]

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.