Ansible #258 has a report regarding The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction switching to bi-monthly publication. According to the report, Gordon Van Gelder points the finger at the increase in costs--particularly postal costs. I can certainly see why. The last few US postal increases, in my opinion, unfairly targeted smaller publications by concentrating sorting-based price reductions in the segment of publications with massive subscriber lists. Oh, goody. People and Us and Stupid Crap Weekly can keep shoving drivel into people's mailboxes at reduced rates, but the segment of the culture that needs nourishing the most gets shafted. No, I'm not just referring to SF magazines. I'm also talking about thousands of literary journals and other niche-sized publications.

So here's the deal. All of my fiction periodical subscriptions are already electronic. I read F&SF, as well as others, on my Sony Reader and my BlackBerry courtesy of FictionWise. I'm not adding one penny to the dead-tree costs associated with the magazines I read. The problem is that a whole lot of you folks are either skipping the print pubs due to cost, or are opting for the paper versions. Neither one of those is going to help keep those pubs alive. That may not matter to you now, but it will when the only thing you have to read is corporate-produced, market-segment-targeted, ad-stuffed, rehashed, re-envisioned, rebooted garbage that was already awful the first ten times you read it.

Put that way, eInk screens start to look pretty readable, don't they?