Hi Phil,

With apologies to everybody in the list I will make an exception and discuss a commercial matter here. I believe in the free spirit of Squeak and respect it a lot but what we are attempting to do could not have been done without a price structure behind it.

We would love to offer Squeak News at $19.95 per year, in fact I would love to offer them for free! Unfortunately just the cost of making these CDs and sending them is about US$6 per month per CD and that doesn't include the cost of collecting and editing the contents, and I am so incredibly indebted to authors who contribute for free without any expectation of any sort. If you think about it for the price you receive 11 CDs including postage and that makes each CD cost you about $9 per CD and it doesn't make a business sense to offer them even at these prices.
It is funny that producing 1000 CDs would cost only a little more than twice of producing the current level of 100-150 CDs (which is roughly our current subscriber base) but we do not have any financial backing to be able to mass produce many CDs and attempt to market them. The first reaction of any financier or VC person that sees Squeak News is: "Wow! What a great thing! But why is all that effort for this obscure language that no one knows about? Why don't we do this for C# or Java?" and start explaining to me how many thousands of them we could sell, even at these prices. I imagine you can guess my answer, and for this reason we have to make it work, and it seems so far that we have to make it work without
any help from any deep pockets.

Squeak News prices will stay reasonably high for the foreseeable future. We have no choice. Either at these prices or there can be no Squeak News.
Meanwhile we are setting up our members only on-line site but since the download amounts will be quite high even the on-line membership at current bandwidth prices will be over $19.95 per year and will only be feasible for broadband Internet users.

One thing we will do though we will put more and more articles and some past articles to our free site.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank to everybody who contributed, subscribed, supported and recommended us. I think with Squeak News we are discovering the real power of Squeak more and more with every issue and this will flow back to the community in one way or another even if doesn't immediately.

Best Regards
Tansel Ersavas
Editor, Squeak News
http://www.squeaknews.com

Phil Weichert wrote:

> Maarten,
>    Yes, SquakNews appears to be great.  However, at $99 us a year the price is
> steep.  The email version is just a review.  Maybe if the price was $19.95 a
> year they would get more subscribers.
>   Great review - sure makes one want to go get a copy.
> Phil