AnvarzhonZhurajev.com

In our small world of Ido speakers, we have a problem lately - namely, editors of official magazine retired and Progreso, which was published since 1907 and lived over the hardest time for conlangs in general and Ido in particular, is not being currently published. That is the long story why this happened, but my personal feeling is that editors were overworked and received too few positive feedback in return. Anemic pariticipation of other idists in the project is something that does not change overnight, but I thought that the publishing process as it exists now is a bit hard, too.

So, today I spent some time exploring the internet about existing publishing solutions. I came to a surprising conclusion that if public services for that really exist, they are well hidden. The closest service I have found so far is HP’s MagCloud, which might be a great service, if it’s only wouldn’t limited to US during current “beta” stage. There are Lulu.com and other Publish-on-Demand services out there, but none is good enough to use it as all-in-one magazine publishing solution.

Here are the requirements for such a service:

1. It must host online version of the magazine for those who don’t need to have a paper version
2. It must allow printing any amount of magazines and sending them to subscribers, defined by an easy administration tool
3. It must editing the contents in an easy way (of course, in some reasonable limits - this should not be another Pagemaker)
4. It might allow combine old issues in single books for those who want to get old issues from the archive
5. It might allow collaboration between different editors
6. It might allow having custom appearances for different subscribers, either in paper, online, or both
7. It should take care about all questions related to subscription, including paying
8. It should synchronize with most popular e-Readers and be available on iPhone and similar devices

Some of this requirements are comprimisable, some not, but in the longer run it would be grat to have them all.  This is something that does not really exist anywhere, it seems.

If anyone wants to start a project to create a service like this, and shares my vision - I am more than willing to participate.