Nate Hoffelder

Do you want to hear some absolutely crazy shit? (This cannot be described in lesser terms, sorry.)

There’s a story that is burning up twitter today. Writing for The Guardian, author Kathleen Hale describes how she chose to respond to a negative review of her first novel.

No One Else Can Have You is a book with controversial themes, so it would be safe to assume that some reviewers are going to hate it, but Hale wasn’t able to simply accept it and let go.

After that first bad review came in, Hale started stalking her reviewer online, and then went to the next level and expanded the stalking into real life. Hale got the reviewer’s home address (which was confirmed by a publisher her publisher, HarperCollins) and after paying for a background check Hale showed up at the reviewer’s home.

Okay, that is not quite how Hale described it in her piece, but my summary differs because I have stripped out her justifications so I could focus on simply reporting the facts of the situation.

Sidenote: Over on PasteBin, someone posted a similar analysis of Hale’s description of her actions. If you read it you’ll see that I am actually understating the issues here. (Thanks, Sunita, for the link!)

And in case you are wondering, some of the justifications I am leaving out include details about the reviewer’s supposed past actions. I am skipping those details because they were reported by someone who is so far round the bend that she does not realize that stalking is bad, and also because Hale would not have the info if not for the fact that Hale was stalking the book reviewer:

“Europe” seemed a vague destination for an adult planning a vacation. But a few nights later, lit only by the glow of my screen, I watched in real time as Blythe uploaded photos of Greece to Instagram. The Acropolis at night. An ocean view. A box of macaroons in an anonymous hand.

The images looked generic to me, the kind you can easily find on Google Images, but then Blythe posted a picture of herself sitting in a helicopter. The face matched the tanned Twitter photograph.

“Fuck,” I said. What if she was real and had simply given the book club the wrong address?

Then Judy updated her Facebook profile with photographs of a vacation in Oyster Bay, New York. I clicked through and saw the holiday had started on the same day as Blythe Harris’s.

I know that there are authors who will instinctively take the side of Hale, but I would remind you that Hale rented a car, drove to the reviewer’s house, and:

Before I could change my mind, I walked briskly down the street toward the Mazda parked in Judy’s driveway. A hooded sweatshirt with glittery pink lips across the chest lay on the passenger seat; in the back was a large folder full of what looked like insurance claims. I heard tyres on gravel and spun round to see a police van. For a second I thought I was going to be arrested, but it was passing by – just a drive through a quiet neighbourhood where the only thing suspicious was me.

Hale also expanded her stalking to include calling the reviewer at her day job.

If you still think Hale was in the right then perhaps I should add some context. After some digging, I found the original review which sparked this debacle. It was on Goodreads, and while I can’t speak to the accuracy I do think it is an honest review.

• https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/640892161

Update: It’s been pointed out to me that I probably linked to the remnants of a review, and not the review itself. To clarify, I see the remarks and the timeline on that GR page as being honest opinions and not the malicious behavior as implied by Hale.

I also found the book blog in question: Finding Bliss in Books 

Since this is a relatively straightforward situation, I have not done any digging to find dirt on the book reviewer. (I refuse to engage in blaming the victim.) I do however have more links which should provide a better understanding of Hale.

For example, she wrote on Thought Catalog that she has cyber-stalked at least one other person, and she previously wrote for The Guardian that she has displayed obsessive behavior.

***

To be honest, folks, I don’t know what to say next. I went into this with the intention of shedding light on both sides, but this situation is so clearly one-sided that I simply cannot.

No matter how bad the review, there is simply no justification for the stalking. None.

And there is nothing else to be said.

Authors and publishers are frequently told that they should engage with readers on social networks, but sometimes it’s not easy to know the right way to go about it. And so when this video from Pittsburgh ad agency Brunner crossed my desk this morning, I thought it was worth watching and sharing.

The following video (found via Digiday) was written with brands in mind, but I think most of the points apply just as well to authors and publishers. After all, when we’re on Twitter, we (and I am including myself) should conduct ourselves with a similar level of care.

The video explains what we shouldn’t do, and it details why. According to Brunner, the top 7 sins are:

1. Speaking with multiple voices
2. Paying for likes
3. Liking your own content
4. Taking too long to respond
5. Disappearing negative posts
6. Taking undue credit, and
7. Overselling

I won’t ask if you’ve committed any of the sins on this list so long as you promise not to point out my errors. Sound good?

TBH, I am guilty of number four, and one could argue that I am also a frequent violator of number 7, but that point would be up for debate. One of the competing schools of thought for social media promotion says that news sites are supposed to be pushy, and by that standard I am not nearly pushy enough.

Digiday

Long considered by some to be a shifty operation, Permuted Press has survived and even thrived in the self-pub boom by being able to offer at least one thing that is still difficult for self-published authors: getting books into physical book stores (in the US, at least).

Alas, that is no longer true. Over the past few days multiple authors have reports that Permuted Press has abruptly changed the contract they signed with authors. Permuted is dropping the print edition for most of the books they have in the pipeline, and they’re also pushing publication dates back by 5 months or more.

Jack Hanson was one of the authors who has been affected; Permuted has had his novel since June 2013 and was supposed to be publishing it today. He just found out that it’s been bumped to February:

My novel, Cry Havoc, was due to be published on October 14th, today. On Thursday, October 9th, all authors from my publisher, Permuted Press received an email from the editor in chief. It stated that they had their "best year ever", but there were going to be four major changes taking place.

The first was that all print on demand (POD) services were going to be discontinued except for specific novels. What this means is that there was no way you would be able to buy a print edition of my novel – it would be ebook only. Second, all novels were delayed immediately. Third, publishing would resume sometime in "early 2015." Fourth, all covers would be an internal decision.

The reasons given were the usual boilerplate about the difficulty of the publishing industry, changing formats, and the usual excuses offered. They claimed there was no breach of contract and that if we wanted to dissolve our contracts, to contact them about it. This email was sent at around 8PM, which makes it around 10PM in the publisher’s time zone. Anyone familiar with how the FedGov works knows what bad news sent over a holiday weekend means.

Naturally he’s not all that interested in working with a publisher who isn’t even going to bother with a print edition (it is the majority a significant part of the market, after all), so Hanson asked for the rights to both of his novels back. He says in his FB post that Permuted is willing to cancel the contracts – right after he pays them $1,100 to cover the investment in editorial costs and cover design.

If that doesn’t set off your skeeze radar, this next bit might. Hanson’s tale has been confirmed to various degrees by Gabrielle Faust, R. Thomas Riley, William Meikle, and others. Many are reporting that Permuted broke the news to some authors at a get together back in September, but didn’t tell the rest of its authors until blindsiding them last week.

And to make matters worse, those print editions which Permuted can no longer afford are actually POD, so aside from the initial design and setup costs there is no upfront cost to production.

And yet Permuted can’t afford the cost of setting up a POD edition? Really? If Permuted is really in such a dire financial state then authors would be advised to flee immediately.

Alas, many might not be able to, because the contract they signed was (according to a couple different sources) absolutely terrible. Brian Keene says he got a look at Permuted’s contracts a decade ago and decided to stay away – far, far, away.

Graeme Reynolds went one step further and detailed the terms of the contract.  I truly hope he made this up, because this is wrong on so many levels:

I started hearing grumbles about the terms of the contracts. There were no reversion clauses in some contracts, and in others little more than a meaningless “out of print” clause that would never be fulfilled. If an author didn’t like working with them, then they were basically screwed because there was no way to EVER get the book back because they signed away their book for the length of copyright. That means its theirs for 70 years after the author dies.  Royalty rates were good, and some authors got advances, but increasingly it seemed that the risk was being pushed directly onto the author. Advances got smaller and then vanished all together. Release dates were nebulous and, in some instances, were YEARS in the future. However, the two worst problems were the “exclusivity” clause which stated that authors were not even allowed to TALK to anyone else about other projects outside of the ones they were contracted for. The authors had to give this press first refusal on EVERY project that they were even considering going forward. And worst of all, they did a massive, and I mean MASSIVE rights grab. All of them, in fact. Every single right associated with the book in any format was licensed to this press for the length of copyright. Foreign translation, multimedia and even dramatic rights. Yeah, they paid a royalty on the “profits” but anyone who has ever had anything to do with book to movie deals will tell you that you should never agree to deals like that because companies have all sorts of ways of showing something never makes a profit on paper. The old $1000 per paperclip scenario.

To be fair, Permuted is no Dorchester (which sold pirated ebooks after the rights had reverted) nor is it even Ellora’s Cave (which has many authors and editors saying that they have not been paid).

But this is still pretty damn bad.

In this day and age Permuted had better be doing something damned amazing to justify their contract terms. If not, authors could easily do better by self-publishing.

Reading might be typically associated with a sedentary lifestyle, but it’s not all bad. Canada’s National Reading Campaign released an infographic last week which details how reading can lower your stress level and help you become a better person.

It can’t do much for one’s weight or cholesterol, but for that I would recommend an audiobook and a good pair of shoes.

Teleread

As National Novel Writing Month approaches, I’m sure many writers are still trying to figure out how they’ll find the time to finish such a long work. While I’m not sure this would work for everyone, one possible solution came across my desk this morning,

Blackberry started a new media campaign yesterday which focuses on authors who had tapped entire novels into their BB smartphone. While this might sound like a good plan to get free advertising, they do raise a good point.

It’s a point which writing experts like Kevin J Anderson have also made: the truly dedicated author tries to find time, even if it’s just a few minutes here and there on a commute, to write their novel.

Geordie Greig, for example, wrote his first novel while working insane hours at a full time job: editing the London Evening Standard. I can’t imagine how he pulled it off, but according to BB he says that:

For two years, I typed away at my book, Breakfast with Lucian, solely using my BlackBerry smartphone. It allowed me to be flexible in my writing schedule as my world shrunk to a three centimetres square screen. I tried to cram a lifetime of Lucian’s extraordinary charisma and impact (Lucian had at least 15 children and became one of the greatest painters of the 20^th century) into that tiny space. This was possibly the first biography ever written on this small, black, compact writing machine which worked for me in bed, at sea, on trains, planes and automobiles, as I tried to bank time and space and thought for my book.

What’s more, he’s not the only author to pull this off. Last year Stuff.co.nz profiled a local author who had written a 1,500 page novel on his HTC smartphone during his daily commute:

Peter King has turned his daily commute into office time – by writing a novel on his smartphone. Rather than wasting the two daily 45-minute journeys on buses and the Hutt Valley train line, he applied himself to writing Changels Genesis. On a good day, when the words flowed, he found he could get 1200 words down in the trip from his home in Normandale to work. "When you’ve got a youngster, you just have to write in those times, because you don’t have a choice," the father of four said.

Writing during a commute would seem to be the more common example of smartphone noveling. That is how Peter Brett wrote his first novel:

It’s no wonder Brooklyn author Peter Brett's first novel is a dark, demonic fantasy – he wrote it on the F train. Brett, 36, tapped out most of "The Warded Man," which hit U.S. bookshelves last month, on his smartphone on daily trips from the Fort Hamilton Parkway stop near his Kensington home to his job in Times Square. "I started out just trying to take notes. I’d sit on the subway, I’d get a good idea and I’d jot something down," said Brett, who works in medical publishing.

To be honest, I’m not sure how much this will help an author who is trying to finish a novel in a single calendar month; most of the authors I found who had written a novel on a smartphone took several years to finish it. Of course, that long delay reflects less on a slow writing style than the simple fact that these authors were so constrained in terms of time that they almost didn’t have time to write the novel at all.

But they still made the time. And as one of the aspiring novelists on the NaNoWriMo forums said, "even if you get a couple of hundred words done on it, that’s a couple of hundred fewer to do later on, so go for it".

Do you think you could write a novel on a smartphone?

image  by Janitors

The American Library Association reported yesterday that Adobe has responded to the ALA’s concerns about the recent revaluations of Adobe spying on users.

You can find the AlA’s press release here, but the short version is that Adobe is still claiming that sending a user’s reading logs in the clear met the standards of Adobe’s privacy policy. Adobe also continues to pretend that they weren’t also scanning user’s libraries and uploading that info as well.

That last bit has been independently confirmed, a fact which renders Adobe’s continued use of misleading statements as out and out deceptive. Their claim that they only tracked a user’s current reading info has been proven to be false, and yet they stick to it.

While some might argue that tracking a user’s current reading info is a reasonable activity, there is simply no justification for Adobe to scan a user’s hard disk, as I initially misreported the story.

As it turns out, Adobe didn’t actually scan my HD. Instead they scanned the ereader which I had not realized had happened to be plugged in at the time that I was running Adobe DE. I did not authorize that scan, nor did I activate that ereader to use Adobe DRM, and yet Adobe still scanned it and part of my ebook library and uploaded that data to Adobe’s servers.

There is no justification to scan an attached ereader without permission. While Adobe might claim that the data was "collected for purposes such as license validation and to facilitate the implementation of different licensing models", that simply does not make sense for a device which had not been authorized with Adobe’s DRM.

But on the plus side, at least Adobe is now promising to encrypt their spying. They’re not promising to stop it but at least now no one will be able to listen in.

That means that we won’t have to worry – not until the next time that Adobe is hacked and user data is leaked to the web. 38 million users were affected the last time this happened, including ebook users.

I feel real safe with Adobe’s plan to use encryption, don’t you?

image by osseous

A relatively new digital publishing trade group in France is making a name for itself this week. Le Groupement pour le développement de la Lecture Numérique, or GLN for short, has released the results of a two month long study of Scribd.

Much to no one’s surprise, GLN discovered that the cloud storage service was hosting pirated ebooks. They report, via Actualitte, that they found 400 titles from French authors which had not been uploaded or licensed by the author or publisher.

Pardon me for being underwhelmed by this story, but all cloud storage services have this issue, and Scribd in particular has a bad name in the publishing industry. They have a history of hosting pirated ebooks, and even though Scribd has taken steps to limit the piracy this is a problem which I don’t see going away any time soon – not without shutting down the service entirely.

And since we can’t make the problem go away, GLN is advising that authors search for their work on Scribd and pursue the usual steps to get it taken down.

In the US that would involve sending a formal DMCA complaint, which should probably also be a workable option for French authors (Scribd is a US company after all).

For some reason GLN doesn’t advise that authors send a DMCA; instead they have detailed a series of steps an author should take. In short, they involve complaining to Scribd, and should that not work expanding the  email blast to include Google, Apple, and Scribd (this threatens the Scribd apps for Android and iOS).

Google has removed ebook apps in response to similar DMCA notices before, so this move will definitely get Scribd’s attention, but if it does not then GLN advises that an author pursue legal action.

Is anyone else puzzled why this group is not advising authors on how to send a DMCA notice?

I would think that would be a basic skill they would want to promote. Many sites are hosted in or do business in the US, and I was under the impression that most are prepared to accept a DMCA notice; that is for example how you get links removed from the Google search results (even the European branches of Google).

I do wonder about a group that advises using Apple to threaten Scribd rather than first suggesting a simpler alternative like a DMCA notice.

Actualitte

Thanks to SEC filings we’ve long known that Barnes & Noble was under contract to release a 10″ Samsung Galaxy Tab Nook, and now it seems they have started to arrive.

My inside sources have told me that B&N stores have started to receive demo units, and that they’re not being put out just yet. Instead I’m told that the demo units are being shown to educators who are being given first dibs on pre-orders.

I don’t understand that either, but if you want to see it, I would stop by a store and ask; I doubt they will refuse to show off the device or take a pre-order.

According to the specs B&N posted on the Nook developer pages, the co-branded Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook 10.1 will be running Samsung’s flavor of Android 4.4 KitKat on a quad-core 1.2GHz CPU with 1.5GB RAM and 16GB internal storage.

It also has Wifi, Bluetooth, GPS, a pair of cameras (1.3MP and 3MP), and a microSD card slot. The 10.1″ display has a screen resolution of 1,280 x 800.
Weighing in at 487 grams, the new Tab Nook measure 8mm thin and has a 6.8Ah battery which is specced for 10 hours of web browsing.

I have not seen one of the 10″ Tab Nooks, but the 7″ model is in all the important ways a Samsung Galaxy Tab, with additional Nook software. That model launched just under 2 months ago.

The new 10″ Galaxy Tab Nook is due to ship on 22 October, when it will be selling for $299, down from a recommended retail price of $349. I still don’t have confirmation that consumers will be able to get one on that day, but I do have reliable sources that say it will be available.

Of course, if you don’t want to wait you can always get a Samsung branded unit. They’re widely available, including at Amazon where it is selling for $291.

Germany’s response to the Kindle gained its third non-German partner this week, the leading Italian retailer IBS.it. IBS will be selling ebooks on its site starting in November, and will also be promoting Tolino tablets and ebook readers in store.

With 44 owned and partner bookstores, IBS.it has a far smaller retail foot print than Mondadori (350 stores), Kobo’s partner in Italy, or Giunti al Punto (170 stores), Amazon’s partner in Italy. It’s difficult for this outsider to estimate market share, but I see that the local coverage mentions that IBS.it serves 2.8 million customers annually.

Formed early last year as a response to the Kindle, Tolino is a shared ebook platform which is supported by 5 German medial retailers and tech companies ( Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Club Bertelsmann, and Deutsche Telekom). It was originally a German response to Amazon, but over the past few months this coalition has taken on a decidedly regional flavor.

In July the Belgian retailer Standaard Boekhandel launched an ebookstore on the Tolino platform, followed last month by the Dutch bookstore coop Libri, and in November the Italian retailer IBS.it will follow suit.

With the addition of IBS, Tolino will have retailers spread across 4 countries in central Europe with around 1,500 retail stores in Germany and 300 stores in other countries.

Will that be enough to counter Amazon?

Well, it’s not enough to defeat that juggernaut but it does at least seem to be holding Amazon at bay. Boersenblatt quotes Nina Hugendubel, managing partner of the bookstore Hugendubel, as saying that the Tolino platform had around 35% of the German ebook market.

That is somewhere in the same neighborhood of the market share Tolino had when it launched last spring, so at worst you can say that Tolino has been treading water as the ebook market grew. And given Germany’s fixed price book laws, and the way such laws discourage customers from shopping around, I’m not sure one could have expected real market disruption.

Note though, that holding steady isn’t necessarily a criticism of Tolino as an idea; it was formed as much to pool resources and reduce costs as a response to Amazon. While the member retailers each have their own ebookstore, they share platform costs and development costs for Tolino’s ereaders and tablets, including the waterproof Vision 2 ereader which was announced earlier this week.

Boersenblatt

Earlier today Kobo confirmed the hints they dropped last month at IFA Berlin: tablets are yesterday’s news.

Speaking to The Bookseller, Kobo president Michael Tamblyn explained that tablet devices were no longer a focus area for the company. Instead Kobo will be turning their attention to apps on other company’s hardware. Tamblyn said: "We found people were just as happy reading through an app on devices than they were reading directly on tablets."

Kobo is now going to turn their hardware attention to maintaining 3 ereaders: the Touch, Aura, and the recently launched Aura H2O. Unfortunately, future plans don’t include a replacement for the 5″ Kobo Mini, alas.

When asked if Kobo was backing out of the tablet market to focus on those three ebook readers, Tamblyn added: "That is something you are generally going to see across all our retailer relationships. The tablet devices we already have out there will continue to be sold, but we are not at this point planning any new tablets."

Kobo has always been a small fry in the tablet market, and they’ve never really had the market share to afford the option of being aggressive in promoting their own hardware.  This put them in a catch 22 situation where they kept being outshouted by larger competitors with bigger marketing budgets and better brand recognition.

And when Takahito Aiki took over for Mike Serbinis earlier this year, the high capital cost of Kobo’s tablet program probably made it a key candidate for that turnaround specialist to put on the chopping block.

Kobo’s new policy resembles Amazon’s current ereader plan, which comprises of 3 Kindles (not counting other hardware like the Fire tablets, etc) and largely runs contrary to B&N’s hardware plans, which consist of a single ereader and a commitment to sell a million units of a pair of co-branded tablets.

The growth of the subscription ebook market continued apace today with the news that HarperCollins had signed a deal with Bookmate.

Bookmate, which is primarily focused on Russia and ebook markets in eastern Europe, will now be able to offer its 1.5 million users ebooks published by HC. No one is talking specifics on the numbers, but the press release does say that "books by hundreds of authors, including CS Lewis are included in the deal".

Simon Dunlop, founder of Bookmate, commented: “This is a big moment for Bookmate. Our users get access to thousands of great new ebooks in English and the recent partnership we have signed is a massive vote of confidence from the publishing industry.”

The service offers a catalog of 500,000 titles which can be read on social reading apps for Android and iDevices. Bookmate recently updated the apps with a social feed which allows readers to follow their friends, favorite authors and celebrities on Bookmate, while also sharing their favorite books and passages.  According to Bookmate, users on average spend 54 minutes a day reading ebooks.

I’ve covered Bookmate in the past, including how it has picked up funding from a leading Russian retailer, its reasons for focusing on certain markets (where piracy is an issue), and how its business model differs from Scribd’s. So I won’t repeat any of that here.

But I will note that Bookmate has a deal which Amazon has not yet secured for Kindle Unlimited. Following the deal between S&S and Denmark-based Mofibo, this is the second time in only a couple weeks that a smaller ebook subscription service scored a contract with a major US trade publisher which Amazon could not get.

I think we’re seeing the start of a trend of Amazon being shunned in this market (for want of a better word).  If it continues then Kindle Unlimited could well be put at a disadvantage.

This trend, if it exists, could well explain the speculation that Amazon is about to open up Kindle Unlimited to all KDP authors – with no exclusivity required. This would give Amazon a significantly larger catalog, and what’s more the idea is already getting positive responses from some indie authors.

Following in the wake of the news that Adobe was tracking users' activities and then uploading the data to their servers without encryption, many ebook users, including librarians, readers, and even those in the digital publishing industry are wondering just how safe other Epub apps actually are.

At the request of several readers, I checked with Bluefire, one of the leading developers of Adobe compatible Epub apps. Bluefire makes an reading app for Android, iDevices, and Windows, but they use a very different standard when it comes to privacy:

We have been asked if we perform similar data collection in our free Bluefire Reader apps. The answer is No. While our apps are built on Adobe Reader Mobile SDK (RMSDK) versions 9 and 10, we are not aware of similar data collection by Adobe in these SDKs.

We do support an optional Bluefire developed sync feature that (when enabled by the user) sends anonymous, encrypted data to our servers. This data is used to sync the user’s reading location across the user’s activated reading devices. We also collect a limited amount of anonymous aggregated usage information. All of this is spelled out in our “Terms and Conditions” and “Privacy” statements.

We want you, our users, to know that we respect and value your privacy. While it is true that some technologies (like page location sync) require the transmission of user data, we believe that it is essential to implement these services in a manner that respects and protects the privacy of our users. We believe that our current apps meet this standard.

For those just tuning in, on Monday I broke the news that the latest version of Adobe Digital Editions was logging my reading activities and uploading the data to their servers in clear text. This feature, which has not been found in earlier versions of Adobe DE, was added for no clear reason. It involved collecting detailed into on everything a reader was doing inside of an ebook, including pages read, ebooks opened, and more.

Adobe defended the tracking with the claim that the data was "collected solely for purposes such as license validation and to facilitate the implementation of different licensing models by publishers". I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether knowing which pages had been read will help with that purpose.

As for me, I will simply remind you that the data was sent in the clear.

Once heralded as the future of news publishing, The Magazine is about to suffer the same fate as many startups: it will be shutting down in just over 2 months from today.

Glenn Fleishman, owner and publisher of The Magazine, announced the news today on its website and added more details on his blog. The last issue will be published on 17 December, after which all existing subscriptions will be cancelled and pro-rated refunds offered either through Apple or directly to readers.

Launched in late 2012 by Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, The Magazine was the poster child for subcompact publishing, a new type of minimalist digital publication that focused on a handful of great stories published at regular intervals. The Magazine was not the first to try this idea, but it was the most visible example and it inspired great hope in news organizations that there was a way to go forward.

Sadly, while there was a lot of hope, there wasn’t all that much money. Fleishman reveals that The Magazine had seen declining subscription rates since the first buzz wore off:

My labor of love the last two years has been The Magazine, first as its hired hand and then, in May 2013, as its owner. The sad truth has been that, while profitable from week one, the publication has had a declining subscription base since February 2013. It started at such a high level that we could handle a decline for a long time, but despite every effort — including our first-year anthology crowdfunded a bit under a year ago — we couldn’t replace departing subscribers with new ones fast enough. We’re a general-interest magazine that appeals to people who like technology, and that makes it very hard to market. "Pivoting" to a different editorial focus would have lost subscribers even faster.

The Magazine will be survived by an industry which it inspired, including the subcompact publishing platform TypeEngine, where the publication had been based for the past couple months.

While I won’t speculate why it failed, I will add that I thought The Magazine represented a transition stage in what could have been the rebirth of the news industry.  I thought that subcompact publishing applied the idea of startup to publishing, and would inevitably lead to some publications growing out of that stage and becoming full-fledged media organizations.

Many blogs went through a similar growth cycle, but unfortunately The Magazine has come up against the reality of startups: many fail, and only a few succeed.