[Coco] Proposal Musing: A retro newsletter “experience”...

[RETRO Innovations]

Allen's request is probably worthy of a research paper, on why humans 
will start to feel guilty and finally set aside time to read periodicals 
in their possession, but have no such guilt about ignoring or even 
deleting emails or other electronic notices announcing an online 
periodical issue.

Sadly, I don't have a solution.  Along with Bill, I have no desire to 
accumulate more paper, and there's an environmental aspect to it as well 
(not to get too political in this list), but I concur with Allen that 
the "idea" of a mailed periodical still thrills.

Perhaps, instead of worrying about the more controversial aspects of the 
original request, the task should be to unearth as much of the 
newsletter content as possible.  In another community I belong to (non 
Coco), we have a resident "archiver" of such content.  Books, 
newsletters, magazines, etc.  If you donate your content to him, he'll 
rip off the binder (it is a destructive process for magazines), scan all 
the content at 300 or 600 DPI, and make it available.  People send him 
old newsletters and such for archiving. And, I think he makes it 
available by month, so someone with a script can quickly organize all 
content by month.  Is there a similar person (or persons) in this 
community?  I can tell you having this resource willing to take and scan 
anything is firmly appreciated.

Then, possibly, someone could write a script that would "notify" folks 
via email by month of content available, with links to the PDFs.  I 
agree it's not the same as Allen's original request, but perhaps the 
novelty of the notice would compel folks to stop and peruse.

If nothing else, it would prepare the way for the final portion of the 
idea, printing and mailing the old newsletters (assuming copyright 
concerns can be addressed)

A similar idea would be the new Rainbow Magazine idea, though I don't 
know if there are plans to produce a real physical version of it.  
(Regardless, I will go on record that folks should seriously consider a 
different, non copyright infringing name :-)  At least if it were new 
content, and were made available via PDF and dead-tree version, folks 
who need that added boost of a physical copy to ensure they read it 
would be accommodated.

Jim