Re: PostgreSQL Magazine #00 is out ! Send feedback please ! - Mailing list pgsql-advocacy

Le 09/06/2011 22:38, Josh Berkus a écrit :
> On 6/9/11 12:58 AM, damien clochard wrote:
>> My intention is provide advocacy material to local user groups in the
>> form of a classy and eye-catching magazine. I've been behind a
>> PostgreSQL booth more than once, and i've always been disappointed by
>> the quality of promotional leaflets and flyers we were giving.
>> Especially compared to level of what you can find for other RDBMS booth.
>
> Right, so you missed the point that the magazine needs to be easy/cheap
> to print everywhere, or it doesn't get distributed at all.
>

Honestly I think is the "easy to print" goal is achieved. With lulu.com,
you can get as many copies you want shipped where you want. It takes a
few seconds.

Now if you want "easy and cheap and classy" than yes it's gonna be hard.

Again, i may have a strong opinion on this, but i'm open to discussion.
If in the end, we decide that "easy and cheap" is the priority then i
will lower the layout quality of the magazine.

>> Based on the lulu.com pricing, you can get 100 copies for US$710
>> (without shipping). Is that the numbers you found too ?
>
> ... plus shipping.  As opposed to getting 200 copies made for *free*,
> which I can do if it's US Letter.

They are free because the specific sponsor that you found requires US
Letter format.  Maybe for the next issues, once we have an economic
model, then we will find sponsors that can pay for A4 format printing.
Do you think it's possible or am i daydreaming ? :-)


> If we have to pay $7 each for copies
> of the magazine, we're going to be pretty reluctant to give them out.
> Which is the exact opposite of what I thought you wanted.

Well it's not exactly what i want.

I don't think that you can give this magazine just like you give away
leaflets or flyers. The magazine should be free, but not given to
everyone. I mean you don't give 24 pages of paper to a guy that will
throw it before the end of the day.

To me, flyers and leaflet are "mass marketing" whereas the magazine
fills the need for "target marketing". For instance, you would give the
magazine to people that come to the booth with a bunch of questions, or
people who spend a little time chatting on the booth. It's not a reward
or anything like that... It's just a advocacy material aimed for smaller
but better audience

In a nutshell, my goal is not print as many magazine as possible and
give them out to anybody. That would be a terrible waste of paper. I
prefer printing less copies, with a high-end look and feel, and give to
people that will actually read it.

> I'm not asking you to reformat the magazine as US Letter.  I'm asking
> you to allow others to do so, without pitching a fit that they're
> messing up your magazine.

wow :-/

a) I am ok to reformat the magazine for you. I just said that i can't do
it before june 18th. Btw you never gave your deadline.

b) I'm doing my best to allow forks. The source code is on github under
a CC-BY-SA licence. I'm using open formats everywhere.

c) I am not pitching a fit to you. I am just discussing about trademarks
issues, format possibilities and other questions that are raised by what
you are asking

d) I never said it was MY magazine. Almost 20 persons have worked on the
first issue and i expect more people to contribute. If you find any
sentence where i say that the magazine is my own project, let me know.

> And the reason I asked for a volunteer to
> reformat is that my desire is to have a US Letter layout which looks as
> good as the current A4 layout, rather than something which has huge
> awkward margins and text shrunk 10%.
>

Like i said, you can't have "easy + cheap + classy". At least for this
demo issue. For the next ones, we will try to ease format transformation.

For now, if you want the US Letter version to be as good as the original
version, than each page needs to be revamped. This is not trivial. I
think it would take between 30 minutes and 2 hours.

If you can wait for week, i will do it for you.

--
damien clochard
dalibo.com | dalibo.org