jsgoddess, did you get my private message?
Yes. I replied, or so my pm list tells me.
Oops, never mind. I just read your private message.
I sent it by pony express. 
Also OT, since this crew might be the place to say this: I’ve got lots of science fiction books that would love to have a new home if anyone’s interested.
I’m sorry to say it but I agree with you. The magazine industry in general is choking. If it wasn’t for the fact that those magazines are close to self-supporting without advertising they’d be long gone. With the current economic problems it’s just a matter of time before they slip below the threshold of self-sufficiency.
Gallileo was published by Charlie Ryan, who later published Aboriginal SF. He was in Newton, MA.
I just sent them a suggestion that they do electronic subscriptions. I suspect they’ve considered it, and the market won’t bear it profitably, but I’ve been meaning to suggest an e-zine to them for a while. I like F&SF a lot. (More so since Rusch left as editor. I like her writing much better than her story selections.) When I subscribed to F&SF I ended up adding their paper magazines to my stack of unread stuff far too often to be worth it. 
(Note to self, less Doping - more reading!)
I buy their e-book editions when I remember to, but I’d love to get a new F&SF every other month in my email inbox, automatically and without prior planning on my part. I have my PDA with me all the time, and I like having plenty to read on it. (Also, my PDA and all of its chargers combined have a smaller volume and a smaller weight than a paperback copy of Cryptonimicon, which I read in e-book form.)
I think I’d pay the full subscription price. I suspect, based on information I’ve seen about publication costs of scientific journals, that the bulk of the cover price is editorial costs, and that printing and distribution are not a large potion of the cover price.
I could be wrong there too, but they can figure out their numbers. Anything they can do to increase their subscriber base is a good thing, IMO.
Professional online magazines die at a faster rate than print publications. Nobody has yet figured out the format that will make money.
Somebody will over the next five years, which is why I predict the print versions will go under. We’re not there yet, though.
Well, it was at one point edited by a Lithuanian (Budrys)
I agree with you that the print version will go under, but not that this will happen due to the success of an electronic version. I think it will happen just from the economics. There just aren’t enough people out there who care about short stories. Just browsing through the bookstores, I don’t see a lot of anthologies anymore except for best of the year collections. We’ve gone from 20 page worlds to 5 volume universes.
I suspect a magazine might survive as an e-book, downloaded to a successful reader or maybe e-paper. On-line there is more stuff for free than you can ever read, so why pay unless you know for sure the work is good. If you can take it with you, and you are used to paying for content, it might work a lot better. Hell, porn can hardly make money on line anymore, so short sf is going to have a terrible time.
The silver lining is that I won’t have to keep finding new places to put them.
When I returned to college, I found out that the university library had a complete collection of Analog back issues. My grades took a tumble. However, I second the notion of reading a few issues of each in the library.
I’m thinking of dropping Analog. This really hurts, because my grandfather subscribed to it, and one of the joys of visiting my grandparents was the fact that Grandpa was delighted to let me read his library of kid safe books and magazines. However, I find that the stories in Analog are not really that good any more. Or perhaps my tastes have changed. I’ve never been a fan of serials, and Analog insists on keeping them. I can see publishing serials when the field is mostly short fiction, and very few novels are put out. However, I think that there just aren’t enough outlets for short SF these days. I guess I’ll pick up a few issues of Asimov’s and F&SF for a while, and decide if I want either or both. I gave up on F&SF some time back, and I’m glad to hear that it’s changed.
I’d start writing Lithuanian immediately if I thought it would make me write like him.
Algis Budrys was a reviewer for F&SF, but never its editor. He did edit other magazines over the years, most notably Tomorrow, but never F&SF.
Voyager, I’m not quite saying that. I think someone will keep some print magazines around for as long as they can, for sentimental reasons. That won’t be much longer. I think that for economic reasons the pressure to convert them to electronic mags will increase to the point where they can only exist as a hobby for someone who can afford to lose money. I do believe that economic pressures will force a way to finance content on the web. My guess is that some form of micropayments will eventually catch on. That will allow a few magazines to have a marginal existence, and that’s pretty much all any sf magazines have had. The short story field in sf has been dying for decades and its conversion to the web will just allow to corpse to remain on life support for an additional amount of time. There certainly won’t be a renaissance of short sf just because the magazines are electronic. Maybe a few will pay as much as 10 cents a word in some glorious future. That would be a nice upgrade.
I trust he was joking. Not only that Budrys was never the editor, but also that I’m sure he knows that Budrys command of English was more than adequate.
I have no doubt that some vaguely fannish magazine will survive, maybe even in print, maybe print on demand. I’m dubious about micropayments, which have been almost here for years now. Ariely talks about the big difference between free and almost free, and micropayments fall into the almost free category. Especially since with the expected readership, micropayments aren’t going to get anyone near the munifcent sum of 10 cents a word.
Here’s another reason I doubt they’ll ever catch on. They’ve been proposed as a way to prevent spam, but even though people care a lot more about spam than reading short stories, the idea has gone nowhere, and a new Internet architecture is far more likely to be adopted as the solution. There just don’t seem to be any killer apps for micropayments.
I’d rather more expect the music model will be followed, with writers trying to break in self-publishing (simple enough) and maybe being picked up by a respected concentrator. The problem is that it seems musicians are only making big bucks in concerts these days, and for writers that seems to have gone out with Oscar Wilde. But maybe 99 cents a story from iFiction could work.
I’m afraid you’re right about that; can’t tell you how sad that makes me. The short story is a great art form, especially (it seems to me) in science fiction. It’s perfect for encapsulating one specific idea. Ray Bradbury could express something about relationships, or the horror of atomic war (or both at the same time) perfectly and without a wasted word in a short story. Fredric Brown was a master of the form.
And getting my issue of F&SF in the mail was a highlight of my month. We’ve gained a lot with the Internet, but we’ve lost some things too. (Or at least it seems that way to people my age.)
Most of the important concepts in science fiction were worked out in short stories, where they could be set out at just the right length. I stumbled across Adventures in Time and Space by Healey and McComas for $3 when I was in high school,and it opened up the Golden Age to me. You can’t get that many new ideas in one novel. I have hundreds of anthologies, and for the most part I’ve enjoyed them more on average than novels.