mass on-demand printing 2

There are other problems with small-circulation literary journals, aside from the fixed costs of printing them at high quality: each journal may have trouble coming up with enough quality submissions to publish regularly, and there's not much of a reviewing mechanism to suggest which journals I'm likely to find interesting and should bother reading. Furthermore, there may be some natural subculture of people interested in a particular magazine, but these people probably don't live in the same area (although I suppose if they do live in the same area, they might very well go to the same coffeeshop).

Now, what I'm imagining is that various people publish things on the Web, much like they do today in blogs and on personal webpages, and perhaps in zines and whatever. They make this available under a license that allows it to be included by other people in their magazines. These may be online magazines, but they may also be on-demand print magazines produced as PSFs. The PSF style would also allow a way for people to charge for the use of their pieces on the basis of per-copy royalties. (I.e., anyone may put this in their magazine's PSFs, but every time a copy is printed I should get 5 cents.)

Now, people can create their magazines using these freely available submissions, perhaps adding pieces exclusive to their mag. They add value not only by collecting exclusive submissions but by doing design, layout, copyediting, etc. They also add value by selecting good pieces; in some sense I may follow a particular mag because I share the editor's tastes. Publishers may also sell ads in their mags, which I'll get to below.

If a publisher wants, they can print copies and distribute them locally or mail them to subscribers, but they don't have to. They make the mag available online as PSFs. It can be printed on demand by anyone who wants it.

Now, this clearly addresses the content-scarcity problem, since writers (and photographers, cartoonists, etc.) everywhere are making their material available for use in different mags. It also addresses the problem of a geographically diffuse group of interested readers, since people can find the mag over the Web and have it printed at their local Kinko's (err, their locally-owned mom-and-pop print shop). The reviewing problem, which I will more CS-ically refer to as the filtering problem, is a more difficult one. There are mechanisms developing in cyberspace (and particularly in the blogosphere and web-commerce-o-sphere) to address this problem, such as collaborative filtering (think Amazon recommendations), PageRank and other forms of link analysis, social networks, blogs linking to other blogs, and RSS feeds. All of these techniques can be applied to creators (writers, photographers, artists), to individual pieces, to individual issues of a mag, and to mags themselves.

Two criticisms come to mind that I imagine people will make of this whole "mod p" idea. First, is there really much value to aggregation? Can't I just use the filtering mechanisms described above to direct me to individual authors or pieces, and view them on the author's blogs or websites? Does packaging things as a magazine offer any significant advantage over reading blogs, watching RSS feeds, and following links to pages that look interesting? Second, why bother printing? Even if people want an attractively designed and packaged magazine, why go to the hassle and expense of printing it, rather than reading it online?

In my next post I will take a stab at refuting these criticisms. I will perhaps also get around to discussing opportunities for selling advertising in a (mod p) system.