To note on the service itself, I’ve posted in other places about how I think the service is very limited in scope… its not doing anything above and beyond other POD’s. In fact, there’s not even anything for non-designers to download to put something together, i.e. Blurb. We’re in the realm of people needing to know at least an intermediate level of designing and working with printers in order to produce one of these mags. And like you said, its very costly. To get someone to pay $10 for a small magazine means the content and design needs to be very good. In my opinion, we’ll see a lot of poorly done magazines or self-indulgent magazines with no audience. I’m not trying to be negative about the service, but I’m personally trying to figure out how this is going to play out.

This will definitely appeal to a lot of us old and current zinesters as it deals with all of the issues that plague us – mainly buying stock up front. However, I feel the service lacks certain things that make zines zines… customization. You’re stuck with standard page sizes and paper stock. Obviously the cost of doing non-standards would make this service skyrocket, but its the nature of zines to be non-standard so its hard to see this service serving many of them. So the question, which you began answering in your post here, is who will use this service? I think we’re going to see a lot of people up front here signing up for Beta and then sitting down to actually put together a 20-40 page book and realizing it ain’t easy. That’s just my opinion, though.

Magazines just aren’t books. On-demand books are much easier as you can automate the design process. I think that’s essentially what it all boils down to.

And to comment on the last part of your post – the custom magazine of the future. I have lots of problems with this. We can see this online already with some services that have been created where you can type in certain words and have a program pull together articles and photos from all over the net to create a custom mag for you on the subject you’re interested in. I’ve tested this out, but it didn’t work for me really at all. What you lose in a custom magazine is a voice. What magazines give us are recognized, constant voices throughout an issue. When you bring together content from all sorts of areas, you lose the voice. Also, in your futuristic prediction, I can’t imagine Vogue or *Wallpaper being around or being the same magazines we know today. The large circ. mags like this would die without advertising and splitting up magazines in this fashion to create a customized one would make advertisers run away – quickly. It takes a lot of money for quality content and as we split, cheapen, and devalue the medium, we’re not going to be left with the same publications as we have today (or had in the last decade).