Print on Demand for Magazines
Mac Slocum
June 18, 2008
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Listen 
Derek Powazek has taken the wraps off of MagCloud, a pilot print-on-demand service for magazines:
Did you know the average sell-through rate for a magazine is about 30%? The sell-through rate is the rate which a given issue of a magazine will sell from a store. That means 70% of all printed magazines are just stopping by the newsstand on their way to the garbage dump or recycling center. All that time, work, and energy, just to make trash.
There must be a better way. And I think MagCloud is a step in that direction.
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May 14, 2009 9:13 PM
Yes but the devil is in the details. MagCloud is ONLY good for glossy Vanity-Fair type junk and they charge you 20 cents per page. So a fifty-page magazine costs 10 DOLLARS. Excuse me??? Even pr0n doesn't cost that much. There's no room for Distributor markup. Distributors require a 55% discount, let's call it 50% for sake of argument. Your 50-page magazine now has to have a list price of $20 so the distributor can get 50% (i.e. $10 of that) and the other $10 goes to MagCloud. Congratulations, you've just sold $20 of merchandise and collected... NOTHING, nada, zip.
May 14, 2009 9:15 PM
Yes but the devil is in the details. MagCloud is ONLY good for glossy Vanity-Fair type junk and they charge you 20 cents per page. So a fifty-page magazine costs 10 DOLLARS. Excuse me??? Even pr0n doesn't cost that much. There's no room for Distributor markup. Distributors require a 55% discount, let's call it 50% for sake of argument. Your 50-page magazine now has to have a list price of $20 so the distributor can get 50% (i.e. $10 of that) and the other $10 goes to MagCloud. Congratulations, you've just sold $20 of merchandise and collected... NOTHING, nada, zip.
May 15, 2009 2:48 AM
magcloud takes the orders and fills them,
so _they_ are acting as "the distributor"...
yeah, it's expensive, but color printing
is _always_ expensive. so deal with it.
the good news is that you don't have to
pay for one page that you haven't sold...
-bowerbird
September 12, 2009 5:14 AM
McCloud is fairly expense. A reasonable price would be 10 cents per page. Realistically the price should only be 5 cents page. However, I have ordered thousands of magazines and sold only a few outside of MagCloud, so you do the calculation.