All posts by Paul Raven

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Niche mag publishing model #271: World of Warcraft, The Magazine

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Still looking for new niche magazine publishing strategies? I sure am – and here’s one that doesn’t revolve around free web content. Indeed, someone’s starting a high quality print magazine on a subscription model. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you World Of Warcraft: The Magazine. Take it away, Ars Technica:

Clearly, there is much to be skeptical about, but the team behind the magazine makes a strong case for a publication of this type. Here’s the scoop on how they plan to sidestep the issues of traditional magazine publishing and still make a profit.

“This won’t be driven by advertising; it’s based on a print-on-demand format. We will launch the subscription website on Friday, monitoring who is subscribing in what language, and print that many copies exactly,” John Gower, International Director of FuturePlus, told Ars. “This will be environmentally friendly—no waste.” This print on demand format allows them to keep publishing costs as low as possible, and releasing magazines to subscribers only—no newsstand—will make sure no copies get thrown away.

“I’m not sure gamers were walking into Waldenbooks to find the newest information anyway,” Dan Amrich, the magazine’s editor in chief, said. So how will the quarterly magazine be advertised? The magazine will launch at Blizzcon, with people being able to subscribe for $39.95, £29.95, or €34.95. That may seem high for four issues a year, but the team is promising a high-quality, large format magazine with heavy paper stock, a glossy cover, and 148 pages an issue… and no ads. “We want this to be a nice surprise when people get it in the post, like unwrapping a Christmas present every quarter.”

Now, the advantage WoW:TM has here over a more general magazine is a ready-made niche interest base of considerable size to pitch to, plus direct access to the information and content that that niche is going to want. But they’re also treating the readers with respect by removing the crappy ads that seem to fill more than half of most game or tech mags, and aiming for a quality physical product that you’re going to want to keep; I’m assuming the content will lean towards stuff that isn’t too time-sensitive. Furthermore, they save on the dreaded pulping margin by going with print-on-demand, keeping their overheads low.

So, I see two takeaways here for the genre fiction scene in particular. First of all, is this a potential model for the genre fiction print magazine surviving? We’ve talked POD in genre before, but I don’t remember it being combined with the no-ads idea. A magazine that makes the effort to be an artefact, a thing of beauty – I’m thinking more Interzone than Asimov’s on the aesthetic front, here – while also delivering 100% great content for a reasonable price… well, in some respects this isn’t that different a model to the existing one, at least in some cases. If WoW:TM succeeds, what will that say about the viability of genre magazines? Is the death of print simply a question of costs not scaling?

Secondly, and maybe more pertinently: World Of Warcraft: The Magazine strikes me as a damn good market for fantasy writers to pitch stories to.

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Keep your doctor close to your heart: the wi-fi pacemaker

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diagram of the heartEarlier this year I mentioned round-the-clock in-body medical monitoring as an imminent transhuman reality, but I didn’t think it’d be quite so fast.

OK, so it’s not a full suite of biomonitors, but a new design of pacemaker talks wirelessly to an internet-connected basestation in the home, sending all the data it gathers directly to the outpatient’s doctor:

So, basically, this patient can provide a full report on the condition of her heart without even leaving home – without doing anything, actually, since the pacemaker reports automatically – and the doctor is able to perform regular check-ups without seeing the patient at all. In fact, since routine pacemaker checks are typically done every six months, the wireless device offers a much greater level of monitoring and care than ever before.

The logical next step here is to make the basestation into some kind of expert system that can deal with routine changes of circumstance without having to involve a busy meat-doctor. Perhaps next time there’s a global epidemic we’ll just be able to breathe into a little device and have it tell us whether we have swine flu or a bit of a cold, followed by advice on how to respond to it. [image found via koreana]

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UFO sightings coincide with UFO movies

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flying saucersVia Futurismic‘s long-term good buddy Mac Tonnies come the results of an analysis of the UK MoD’s “x-files” documents, recently released to public scrutiny; apparently UFO sightings were more common around the times at which popular films or television shows featuring alien races or spacecraft were screened. [image by eek the cat]

The obvious conclusion here is “well, skiffy movies cause alien sightings; case closed”. But as Mac points out, that’s not logically sound:

There’s doubtlessly a correlation between science fiction and UFO reports. But while pop culture’s influence on potential UFO observers is a fascinating subject with important sociological ramifications, to flaunt Clarke’s findings as a refutation of the phenomenon in general is to willfully ignore the evidence in its entirety.

UFO researchers aren’t interested in “noise” cases — the inevitable false alarms that plague efforts to study the phenomenon (whatever its origin). Indeed, scientists who have addressed the UFO problem have always been painfully aware of the disproportionately high volume of false returns.

Now, you may more skeptical than Mac regarding the causes of UFO sightings, but his point still stands – divorce the logic from the specific subject matter, and the same applies to any sort of genuine scientific enquiry. I’m pretty sure this is what they call confirmation bias at work, and it makes me wonder how often it affects us…

… although it obviously happens often enough for it to be politically useful. 😉

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The perpetual aircraft carrier: turning seawater into jet fuel

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aircraft carrierIf you’re getting twitchy about the uptick in petrol prices, spare a thought for the US Navy: fighter jets don’t just fuel themselves while parked on those aircraft carriers, y’know. But what if those same aircraft carriers could suck up seawater and catalyse it into aviation fuel?

Navy chemists have processed seawater into unsaturated short-chain hydrocarbons that with further refining could be made into kerosene-based jet fuel. But they will have to find a clean energy source to power the reactions if the end product is to be carbon neutral.

Nuclear-powered carrier? Sorted. So how does it work?

The process involves extracting carbon dioxide dissolved in the water and combining it with hydrogen – obtained by splitting water molecules using electricity – to make a hydrocarbon fuel.

[…]

In the conventional Fischer-Tropsch process, carbon monoxide and hydrogen are heated in the presence of a catalyst to initiate a complex chain of reactions that produce a mixture of methane, waxes and liquid fuel compounds.

Dorner and colleagues found that using the usual cobalt-based catalyst on seawater-derived CO2 produced almost entirely methane gas. Switching to an iron catalyst resulted in only 30 per cent methane being produced, with the remainder short-chain hydrocarbons that could be refined into jet fuel.

Heather Willauer, the navy chemist leading the project, says the efficiency needs to be much improved, perhaps by finding a different catalyst.

There you go – once those niggling little details are out of the way, you’ve got yourself an aircraft carrier that doesn’t need to pick up fuel for itself or its complement of aircraft, and hence doesn’t need to return to base for years (provided they can scrounge up food for the sailors and pilots in whatever theatre of operations they’re in at the time, natch).

But now imagine that it goes rogue… or someone manages to hijack it, Somali pirate style, only with no intention of ransoming it – why get rid of your own private strike-force-equipped floating nation-statelet, after all? [image by Serendigity]

Regular readers may note I’m becoming vaguely obsessed with the intersection of the oceans, geopolitics and sustainable technologies. I’m no Bruce Sterling, but I’m still confident in my assertion that plenty of weird stuff will be happening on the high seas in our not-so-distant future.

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Dead famous: microblogging and morbidity

Another thought-provoking post from Joanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum sees her musing on the way Twitter, the 24-hour news cycle and citizen journalism have escalated the death of minor celebrities to the status of the fashionable small-talk of the digerati:

Every day on Twitter, news of another death. Les Paul, John Hughes, Farrah Fawcett, those big names, but also the editor at this publication, the founder of this startup, the people who we might not all know, but someone you know knew them and they are using the space to remember them.

Sure, Maria Shriver’s euology made me sit up straighter and think I want to be like that. But, I mean, was I supposed to be shocked that Eunice Kennedy passed on? I guess it’s small talk of a darker sort. You could talk about the weather or whose heart stopped.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t want to sign on Twitter, precisely for that reason. What if David Cronenberg died? Or Bill Callahan? Sophia Coppola, Rachel Maddow, Tilda Swinton, anyone I like.

[…]

I still think the web has the capacity to bring out the best and the worst in us. We’re going to look back at the spectacle of Jade Goody’s wedding earlier this year and think how innocent it was, how damn near respectful people were to her and her family. It’s all downhill from here. Death is just something you think about until the next 140 character tweet appears.

I don’t think it’s going to get all that much worse – and if it does, we won’t be appalled by it, because the frog will be boiled slowly – but I’ve long been fascinated by the visceral sense of Zeitgeist that working all day on the web has given me, and there’s definitely a change in my attitudes to different sorts of news. (That said, my complete disinterest in manufactured minor celebrities remains strong, which I’m quite pleased about.)

It’s almost as if dying is the best way to get the whole world to take notice of you these days. But how much harder is it to disappear from view completely? In another of Wired’s more interesting journalistic projects of late, they’re sending off Evan Ratliff with instructions to drop “off the grid” for thirty days, and offering a prize of $5,000 to anyone who finds him using the publically available data trail that he’ll generate. I’ll not be surprised if someone snags him pretty quick  (unless he has some sort of ace in the hole for staying incognito), but the story promises to be interesting whatever the outcome, especially in light of other recent disappearances, successful, deliberate or otherwise.