Enabling storytelling

Jonathan Saunders is one of the first to take the plunge as a publisher on MagCloud.

i like to tell stories: Stories, Now Touchable.: "the printer is still in beta, but has been helpful in addressing my concerns and honestly reacted well to all my thoughts and attention to detail. i am a stickler or pain in the ass, so i was impressed with the good effort the printers have put forth."

He's a pain in the ass? Sure, but the kind who is a perfect Beta user. He's let us glimpse his process for creating a quality product, and that won't only help him reach his own objectives, it's going to help future MagCloud publishers everywhere. Thanks, Jonathan!

Putting the "New" in "Best New Magazines"

There has been a fair bit of blogging about MagCloud since we went public last month, and most of the attention is on our print on demand fulfillment of magazines. Yes, HP is well positioned to provide this service given we are a market leader in commercial digital print with our Indigo presses, and thousands of print service provider customers worldwide. I have no doubt the HP machine of R&D and marketing will continue to win in the POD marketplace.

But at MagCloud we are really doing something a bit different than POD. We're lowering the barriers to access POD services to enable whole new categories of publications. Our tagline is, after all, The Best New Magazines. My colleague Nathan provides a perfect example: what he likes to call a "reference magazine." We're all familiar with reference books: bulky and generally expensive tomes that provide critical information you need to refer to repeatedly. Online search engines have replaced the need for many hardcopy references, but Nathan's Color Thesaurus cannot be so replaced.



Not only is Nathan's reference magazine a valuable compilation of the results of an online color naming experiment (what words do people use to describe specific colors?); when published via MagCloud it also provides an excellent wysiwyg color reference to use when producing a MagCloud magazine!

Read more about Nathan's magazine on his Mostly Color Perception blog: Digital Pages Are Different.

More on the technical metric, "suckiness"

Derek graciously provides one answer to the question in my blog's tagline.

According to Powazek, the current business model for magazine publishing “sucks”, as about 70 percent of printed magazines are unsold.

MagCloud, print-on-demand service for magazine publishing launched - sfnblog