UPDATE: There’s an interview with MagCloud’s creators here.

Paper is a strange beast. Environmentally suspect, over time it yellows, turns brittle, starts to smell a bit musty. The colours never shine as well as they do on the screen, it tears, it creases, it’s heavy to store and rapidly decreases in value. And it’s still a vital part of our culture.

One of the reasons that paper endures, despite the naysaying of digivangelists, is that printing technology has continued to evolve alongside the rise of the virtual. Most of these changes aren’t noticeable to the majority of end consumers – glossier recycled paper, soft proofing, better colour management. Others are quite clearly advances that I can explain to my mother in one sentence, and she’ll understand why that’s clever.

Such as: “Anyone can make their own magazines for free.” Enter MagCloud, a new print-on-demand website dedicated to magazines.

It works like this: you upload a PDF of your magazine to the MagCloud website. You are then told a minimum price per copy that it can be sold it, to cover their production costs. You set a sale price above that, and make it available on the website. MagCloud processes the orders, deals with the payments, sends you your margin, and then prints out a single copy of the magazine and mails it to the customer. You have zero fixed costs, and don’t have boxes and boxes of unsold mags in your garage. Everyone’s a winner. Ish.

Print on demand (POD) pitched directly to public hobbyists isn’t anything very new. I wrote about it in The Guardian back in 2004, the same year that JPG Magazine first appeared on sale at Print-on-demanders Lulu.com. (Disclosure: I won the Lulu Blooker Prize for Fiction last year for a POD book of my own; I’ve never done any work for them or MagCloud.) The afore-mentioned Everywhere is printed on demand for the number of subscribers of each issue, Boico‘s Zine was an interesting POD experiment last year.

What’s different this time is:

• MagCloud is dedicated solely to magazines (Lulu.com describes its service as “brochures”)
• MagCloud is a creation of Hewlett Packard, who make the Indigo, one of the most popular POD printers

What’s the point of MagCloud? It’s a creation of HP’s research labs, so is one of their more ‘out there’ inventions, and it’s been worked on by Derek Powazek, founder of the afore-mentioned JPG. He describes it on his blog as both “in beta” and “a pilot”. It’s quite possible that this is more about PR and image building for HP machines than a genuine service with its own business plan. (It wouldn’t be the first time for HP.) It’s also possible that this is part of a bigger strategy of becoming a company that prints and delivers personalised content directly to customers. (That wouldn’t be the first time either.)

Whatever HP’s motives, one thing is clear: MagCloud is currently far too expensive to make much of an impact. $4.00 for 20 pages, or around $9 for 44 pages just isn’t good enough for many readers beyond friends and family. But imagine if this service becomes much more affordable, as cheap as or cheaper than the newsstand. And imagine if readers were allowed to select their content. And imagine if big publishers started using it. Then what?

First, the problems of the cost. Some ideas on how it could be made cheaper:

- ancillary services. As well as a free PDF option, Lulu also sells extras, such as editor evaluations and listings on Amazon. MagCloud could also offer Amazon sales/other distribution, unusual formats, plus closer attention by a print professional, special printing effects, etc. These would cost significantly more – and the profit would partly go in lowering the base price
- advertising. You categorise the magazines, and sell the ad space in bulk. Magazine makers can opt to include advertising for a reduced price. Also people could buy advertising for their POD magazine in someone else’s (or exchange it). Inserts.
- offer packs of four magazines together, bound up as one. Back issues or similarly themed magazines could work.

Next, how could this technology be used for interesting ends?

- tie-ins, such as with Getty Images, Shelf Made, Issuu, Loot, local press. Turn magazines into paper backups of Flickr, Facebook walls, forums, bookmarked webpages, iCal and other information for a holiday. Use it to make long-dead magazines available again. 1980s copies of The Face. A complete set of Brodovitch’s Harper’s Bazaar. Sure, it’s not going to be exactly the same as the original, but what is? It could be an interesting and potentially exciting niche opportunity for publishers to connect archives with availability, without losing the physical sensation of print
- create associations with Universities, schools, conferences, museums, Wikipedia, Project Gutenburg and other groups where personalised / selected content for individual copies could be a great feature
- get graphic design students to pair up with people who have stories they want to tell editorially, and then create strange, wonderful magazines

And if the big licensing issues could be overcome?

This is answered in a piece I wrote in the Colophound magazine we published last year, reprinted below. MagCloud may be turn out to be little more than a publicity stunt, or an experiment gone wrong, or aimed only at bedroom magazine makers with the result being as numbing as most of the books on Lulu. But it certainly got me thinking.

A magazine from 2027

This magazine is a strange beast. The cover, it says, has been created by the winner of this year’s Turner Prize, but this isn’t an art magazine. Instead, the cover is more of a free gift for subscribers, because the content inside has been compiled to the individual formula of the person who this is for, in this case a woman in her early 20s.

According to an accompanied sheet of figures about the industry, less than 10% of readers now buy magazines that are 100% any single brand; instead, the rule of thirds is the main driving factor. The most common title subscribed to is Facemag, created by the makers of Facebook to feature news and photographs from your friends and colleagues. This particular copy’s lead Facemag story is a hen party, with a selection of photos by some of the people who attended. There’s also a couple of short feature stories that have been lifted from blogposts by friends of the subscriber, and some news-in-brief, single paragraph updates.

Also in this issue is 80 pages from Vogue – the latest top photoshoot and a summary of the catwalk fashions. The small print inside tells me that the following week will include selected content from Harpers, the week after that from Wallpaper* – and that more content can be purchased via the reader’s online profile. The final third seems to be taken from news from local newspapers and websites – the top stories from particular cities where the reader has probably lived or maybe is just interested in.

An ad on the inside back page talks of a new service starting this month – 20 pages of specially curated content for the price of 10. This content is supposed to open the magazine, and will be chosen, edited and designed by former big names in the magazine industry, including editors of the New Yorker and the designer of Creative Review; I can visit each of their profiles online to see who they are. Strange and a little disjointed as this new magazine world is, it’s something of a relief for me to see that the editor still has a job, albeit as a personal brand that even competes with the magazines themselves.