"Gardner Dozois - The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 14" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

without at least a trickle of new subscribers coming in, you can't counterbalance the
inevitable attrition of your subscriber base due to death and circumstance, and
sooner or later you're left with no subscribers at all, or at least not enough to keep
the magazine in the black.

One mildly hopeful note is that in the last couple of years most of the SF magazines
are pulling in at least a trickle of new subscribers over the Internet from audiences
that probably haven't been tapped much by them before, including people who had
probably never heard of the magazines before coming across them online (most
people, even many habitual science fiction readers, have no idea that the SF
magazinesтАФwhich receive no advertising or promotion at all, in most casesтАФeven
exist), and people from other parts of the world, where interested readers have
formerly found it difficult to subscribe because of the diffi-culty of obtaining
American currency and because of other logistical problems. Asimov's, Analog, and
F&SF have also all made deals with Peanut Press (http://www.peanutpress.com)
that enable readers to download electronic versions of the magazines into Palm Pilot
handheld computers, with the choice of either buying an electronic "subscription",
or of buying them individually on an issue-by-issue basis, and a small but steady
flow of new subscribers drawn from new audiences is coming in from this source as
well.

With today's chaotic newsstand situation, which keeps most SF magazines off most
newsstands, I have a feeling that if anything is going to save the magazines, it'll be the
use of the Internet as a promotional tool, using Web sites to push sales of the
physical product through subscriptions, and so I'm going to list the URLs for those
magazines that have Web sites: Asimov's site is at http://www.asimovs.com.
Analog's site is at http://www.analogsf.com. The Magazine of Fantasy & Science
Fiction's site is at http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/. Interzone's site is at
http://www.sfsite.com/interzone/. (Realms of Fantasy doesn't have a Web site per
se, although content from it can be found on scifi.now.com . . . although you could
surf the whole site and be hard-pressed to find even a mention of the magazine's
name; if you persist, though, you can eventually find a place to subscribe to it
online.) The amount of activity varies on these sites, with the Asimov's and Analog
sites perhaps the busiest and the Interzone site perhaps the least active, but the
important thing about all of the sites is that you can subscribe to the magazines
there, electronically, online, with just a few clicks of some buttons, no stamps, no
envelopes, and no trips to the post office required. It would be hard for us to make
it any easier for you.

All of these magazines (and a half dozen others) deserve your support. One of the
best things you can do to ensure that short science fiction remains alive and plentiful
in the market is to subscribe to whatever magazine you like best. In fact, subscribe
to as many of them as you canтАФit'll still turn out to be a better reading bargain, more
fiction of reliable quality for less money, than buying the year's hit-or-miss crop of
original anthologies could possibly supply. Do it now, while you're thinking about it,
and while it still has a chance to help. If you're a fan of short SF, as someone
reading this book presumably is, and you don't bother to do it, you're taking a
chance that there could be a lot less short SF around to enjoy in the future.

There were another couple of upbeat notes in this troubled market this year. The