MagCloud is a print-on-demand publishing service that prints, mails and manages the subscriptions of your magazine. The only thing you really have to do is to upload a PDF of your mag, create a PayPal account, and find some way to pay for MagCloud services. When someone orders an issue, Magcloud custom-prints it for 20 cents per page and ships it for you. The costs for a 20-page magazine would therefore add up to $4 plus shipping, and how much you end up charging for the issue is entirely up to you.

Your mag gets placed in the cloud—a digital gallery on the MagCloud website—and there it waits until someone comes along and wishes for its materialization. Before that, you’re able to order proofs so you can see what your computer-based labor of love looks like in print. The magazines are printed with HP Indigo Technology, full color on 80lb paper with saddle-stitched covers. That’s pretty much it—according to Magcloud at least.Printing costs and subscription fulfillment normally terrify budding small circulation magazine publishers, especially those printing fewer than 10,000 copies per issue. Because of flat fees and pre-press costs, it’s the case with most traditional printers that the fewer copies you print, the more expensive your per-copy costs. This means that printing 5,000 additional copies isn’t what’s prohibitive or dizzying: it’s the first 5,000 that cause high balances.

But printing is only the half of it. A minimum volume is needed to benefit from the United States Post Office bulk rates, and if you don’t meet the minimum, the only other cheap option is to send your mag media mail rate for just over two dollars. This wouldn’t be so bad if media mail was a trustworthy and timely method but, as it turns out, well, as many things with the post office go, it’s not.

Most small magazines, no matter how small, spend their lifetimes cultivating business models that sell their content, forging relationships with printers who may eventually over deep discounts, and seeking subscription fulfillment models that are cheap enough to return revenue. After years and a growing readership, some may still find themselves having to do massive issue mailings with intern help at the office, or picking up on issue from a printer in a Uhaul truck to save cash.

MagCloud promises a quick-fix solution to printing and marketing, but it does not take into account special needs of these small publishers, especially for those who’d like to ask that a printer pay special attention to the treatment of an image, or take care of a subscriber who’s really pissed because they never received his her or issue.

Flipping through MagCloud’s customer support service pages you get a different impression of the relation of price and print quality. If you multiply 20 cents a page times 80 pages, well, that’s a lot for a smalltime publisher. People also complain about washed-out colors, varying print results, about bleed and size errors and shipment delays. This sounds similar to the criticism received by Students at Hochschule Darmstadt when it created “Dear Lulu,” a 96-page book to test the reproduction quality of on-demand printers such as Lulu and Books on Demand. The result, originally intended to be solely a color test, evolved into Books on Demand. The result, originally intended to be solely a color test, evolved into thorough research on the topic.

On the other hand, the entire distribution system for small magazines tends to work against them, at least financially speaking. Distributors often charge bloated rates for the simplest of services—for instance, shipping 10 copies of your magazine in bulk to a bookstore can cost more than if you shipped them each individually. Then, if you, weak at heart, would like to avoid getting the cover of your precious creation torn off by a bookseller when it doesn’t sell, you have to pay the bloated cost of getting the issue returned to the distributor, who will charge you another bloated fee for returning them to your office or warehouse. These costs are all estimated, and always in the future, with your next issue, and are subtracted from any profit you might make on the current issue—which means that you make next to nothing no matter how well you’reselling.

MagCloud print-on-demand might be an example of what Jonathan Zittrain calls the generative pattern, an idea, so obviously promising that it spreads and gets adopted. Though incomplete, it is already in use and gets refined gradually, when new adopters improve and help to spread the word.

Which takes me back to Magcloud’s customer support, which is outsourced to getsatisfaction.com–a third party service intending to improve the communication between customer and support. Actually a fair solution, as it is not designed to protect the company from angry mobs, but to bring both parties closer together. It basically works like a forum, with elements from social network communities. Each Magcloud employee has a profile and a help history, displaying the quality and frequency of his answers. Like on twitter, you can follow a thread if you need help with a similar topic and before deciding whether or not to follow, you can even check out the mood there. Of course there is not a smiley in every thread, and you might feel estranged adressing your complaints to an official PM with a cupcake-thumbnail, who has neither started any topics so far nor answered to any question. But that’s the point: it is a Beta version, that is not trying to hide it’s imperfection, but that might help to draw attention to the bugs that need to be fixed in order to make print-on-demand services more appealing.

Thus, MagCloud may not be the future of magazine publishing, but the idea behind it is promising for those who want to get their words in print, for whatever motive. By decentralizing distribution, printing on demand can save a lot of unnecessary shipping and storing costs. If printed regionally, depending on the shipping destination, it might become a green alternative to traditional distribution practices. But these are all points of critique that are tied to print media. In this sense, Magcloud is still a walled garden, offering only thumbnail sample pages online. Protectionism of this kind hasn’t turned out to be future-proof. Once a system is opening, it’s hard keep the borders, as the history of Compuserve and AOL have shown. The major evolution ahead might be to take print-on-demand literally and leave the decision, whether or not to pay for the materialization of a magazine, entirely up to the user. 

—Alexandra Heifetz and Anna Jumped

Read on:

Supply On Demand // printmag.com

Print-On-Demand // wikipedia

Introducing MagCloud and the Future of Magazine Publishing // powazek.com

MagCloud: In 7 Schritten zum Eigenen Print-Magazin // Upload Magazin

P&Ls And How Books Make (Or Don’t Make) Money // The Writer’s Beat