I don’t know that print is dying, but if it is I want it properly mourned. So I’m partial to the sentiments of Dan Sinker, a print person moving on but paying his respects to the medium he leaves behind. Sinker goes so far as to concede print virtues he hopes his new paperless publishing experiment will replicate.
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Submissions can be sent to stories@cellstories.net. Contributing authors will be compensated by being showcased: with CellStories as with so much paperless publishing, the paper prohibition extends to money.
The stories Sinker plans to post, mostly fiction, will run about 2,000 words, give or take. The service will be free—but if the idea flies and he expands it so that readers can download and save stories they like and root through archives for old ones, he’ll charge a small subscription fee, something like 99 cents a month.
And because it is so congenial, he believes the public will enjoy reading stories on it—”things that might take 15 minutes or 20 minutes. Your eyes aren’t going to burn out. You’re not going to get uncomfortable. You can sit there with a beer in one hand, or a cup of coffee in one hand, and read this thing.”
“The idea of going back into print is insane, totally insane, because it’s a sucker’s game,” he goes on, “The finding of the material is the easy part. The making of the thing and the getting that thing anywhere from my living room is as close to impossible now as it’s ever been. Distribution is killing everyone. Suddenly [in print] you have no way to compete. You have no way to compete with something instantaneous when you’re talking about communicating information.”
“I will never forget the magic that would happen every month with Punk Planet when you get that pallet of fresh magazines and you cut it open and you get that blast of fresh ink smell. But I’ll never forget the huge pile of magazines when we shut down, and the number of trips we had to make to recycling places to get rid of them, and the sense of waste.
