P3D Re: Internet & Publications

["Ray Moxom" <raymoxom@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Following Don Wratten's item on 'The Stereo Glossary' in P3D3679 DrT
included the following in his discussions (extracts below):

George has raised a number of new and interesting issues.

While the printed bulletin of our Sydney Stereo Camera Club has been in
continuous production since 1971, we have only been producing an email
version of '3D Window', our club bulletin, for a little over a year now.
Both Southern California and Potomac were ahead of us in the electronic
publishing area. Cascade and Chicago also have electronic versions of their
bulletins.

Each bimonthly issue is 20 pages with both club and general 3D articles. The
current series on coupling Olympus XA cameras has proven very popular and
has resulted in an increase in overseas email members. A sample issue from
the 1900s (September 1999) can be downloaded from our website at:
http://www.sscc.asn.au/sscc/index.htm

File size is not all that large (300 to 450kb) as the email bulletin is
highly compressed. The original uncompressed file is between 8 and 12Mb.
Stereogram should compress to about 150 to 250kb which is not all that large
an attachment. (I get the printed version on a club bulletin exchange
arrangement)

I can send a sample electronic copy of the current issue January 2000) of
'3D Window', together with our standard email describing how to view and
print it, to anyone who is interested in seeing how the email distribution
of bulletins can operate. Or, for that matter, to anyone who would just like
to see an Oz perspective of what is happening in stereo. Send a request to
me at 3d@xxxxxxxxxx and I will get a sample copy to you by return email.

DrT extracts:
>1. Give the publication for free in the Internet.  This is done
>by the "3DNews" of the Stereo Club of Southern California.  This
>makes very little sense to me and it made less sense when the
>"free for grabs" announcement was coming two weeks before the
>loyal hard-cash-paying subscribers got their newsletter in the
>mail (fortunately, this is "corrected" now).
>
>2. Allow for email subscriptions, in addition to regular
>snail-mail subscriptions.  This is currently done by the
>"3D Window" of the Sydney Stereo Camera Club (Ray Moxom
>Editor)
>
>3. Do not offer email subscriptions but put a good amount
>of information in the Internet, with perhaps the option to
>download a free issue.  Offer something for free and hope
>that this will generate interest that will result in more
>subscriptions.
>
>It seems to me that most Editors and most publications today
>should be looking at options #2 and #3.
>
>Offering a (small scale) publication via the Internet makes a
>lot of sense for a number of reasons:
>
>Color pictures which make a publication very expensive,
>are no problem with the internet.  For example, most pictures
>in the "3D Window" are in color (or should I say "colour"? :-))
>in the emailed version (pdf file to be read with Acrobat Reader,
>a free software) while in the mailed copy they are black and white.
>
>It is possible to get a better printed copy by printing the
>digital publication directly from the subscriber's side.
>Small publications are distributed photocopied, which does
>not reproduce pictures well.
>
>These are the advantages of distributing a publication
>electronically.  I can think of a couple of disadvantages,
>and right now I am facing one of them:  The size of the
>publication can be a problem.
>
>To illustrate this point, consider that our last issue of the
>Stereogram is 1.5MB.  That's quite a large file size
>to transmit through phone-lines.

Ray Moxom