Comments on: Right Reads

By: Freddy Gray

Freddy Gray — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:37:18 +0000

Good thinking Angela. See above (http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2009/10/26/favourite-books-youve-never-read/)

By: Angela

Angela — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 21:41:16 +0000

I love my hard copy. That’s all I’m saying.

Daniel it might be fun to open a post and invite readers to list one or two of their favorite but unread books.

By: R J Stove

R J Stove — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:38:36 +0000

Americans who object to paying $30 for a hard-copy mag subscription should spare a thought for Australians. Thanks to the sheer distances involved and the costs of air mail postage, we Aussies pay at least twice as much to get American periodicals (in their print format) as Americans themselves do. (With, say, The New Yorker, it’s more like three times as much.)

Sea mail postage is considerably less expensive, of course. But if I relied on a sea mail subscription to get TAC hard copies, I’d be waiting three or four months for each number to arrive.

Instead, being an impatient type, I hang on like grim death to my online TAC sub. I tell myself, like a kid awaiting his Christmas gifts: “Only three more sleeps till the next TAC issue in PDF form.”

By: SteveM

SteveM — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:59:45 +0000

Daniel,

Great. Thanks.

When you guys were trying to drum up some cash earlier in the year, the online-only alternative seemed like a good one to me then. Especially since the gap between the online posting and the actual hard copy delivery is so long. When I get the hard copy now it’s sort of anti-climatic.

Anyway, looking forward to an improved interface.

By: Daniel McCarthy

Daniel McCarthy — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:19:49 +0000

Steve and Barney: There are some tweaks to the PDF system, including an online only option, coming soon. Will put up a post about them when they’re ready, which will be toward the new year.

By: Barney Rebble

Barney Rebble — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:57:19 +0000

Did you ever figure out a way for us to order an “online only” subscription, with NO hardcopy mailed?

By: MattSwartz

MattSwartz — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:57:09 +0000

A subscription costs as much as two evenings out at the movies, one trip to the bar, or a twelve-pack of Red Bull.

Unless there are some pretty serious mitigating circumstances involved, I feel pretty safe in saying that a subscription will provide most readers with more entertainment over the course of a year than any of those things.

In the last two years, I have read four or five articles I thought were lame, and maybe one or two I thought were unconscionable, but that is less than 5% of the total in what I find to be the most consistent, interesting, witty, and well-measured magazine in print today.

If that isn’t worth $30, I don’t know what would be.

By: SteveM

SteveM — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:04:54 +0000

Uh…I’m a subscriber. While I enjoy the online access, the pdf interface pretty much stinks.

Can you fix that?

P.S. Why don’t you have a simple index page with hyper-links to complete individual articles like every other online mag does?

By: R J Stove

R J Stove — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 23:15:15 +0000

But I’ll bet the cover picture for your December issue isn’t as pulchritudinous as the one for November. Especially if part or all of the December cover is devoted to Macaulay. Great writer and all that, but oil painting, nah, he wasn’t an oil painting.