I enjoy your magazine and have been a subscriber for many years. I would like to complain / make some suggestions about the availability of old PCW material in digital form.

Currently, you can purchase CDs containing 1 year's worth of editorial content for £15 (obviously only after the current year is complete). Alternatively you can buy individual Hands On articles in PDF format for 99p. In addition this you can get the magazine in digital Zinio format (although I have not explored this to discover the price.

My first complaint is mainly a technological one. Making CD-Roms seems so cumbersome and old fashioned in this day of widespread Internet use and increasing availability of broadband. Surely a better way would be to have an
archive of editorial content (i.e. expand the Hands On model) which users
could search and download individual articles or features  instead of having
to shell out what is actually 60% of the price of a subscription, for a CD
mainly consisting of articles you probably didn't want.

Second, the pricing is a bit much. As mentioned the CD roms are vastly overpriced, when most people would have specific needs rather that wanting
to own the whole caboodle! I can't believe they sell well at this price. The
"subscriber's discount" is a joke - subscribers should have access to this
for free!

I propose a model more like the majority of scientific/medical journals I use for work:

FIRST, paid-up subscribers should get automatic access to an electronic archive of all the up-to-date material as long as they are subscribing (or get the CD-Roms free).

Any old stuff e.g. greater than 1 year (since most useful info in the IT industry is very time sensitive) should be available for free for download for everyone, including non subscribers.

Certain current material might  be available free from publication date - news items (usually replicated on the website anyway), and letters perhaps. Other content which is the most useful stuff, but which goes out of date (Hands On, reviews, general features) should be available to buy on a per article basis for an initial period (e.g. 1 year) after which it goes into the free archive for reference.

You need to ensure that there is a useful "abstract" or summary for the pay articles so people can adequately know what they are buying. Obviously the variables such as price per article (you could be really innovative - have a sliding scale of price, a premium price soon after publication, which gets cheaper as time goes on!), length of time before free, would be subject to variation depending on your business model, but in principle this seems a better way of making your content available. Surely your older content does not generate much revenue for you, yet its easy availability would be of use to your readers.

Alan Choo-Kang

Let us know your views on the availability of archived online PCW material - simply post your comments below or send us an email.