A magazine with no cover… and other interesting facts
March 24, 2007
Green is in and April is the month to celebrate anything and everything green. Well, Creative Review magazine took the celebration one step further. The April issue of the magazine has just published with no cover. Yes, it starts on page 3, the table of contents. The magazine is sold in a plastic bag and an explanation: “This magazine has no cover: In the spirit of making the most of limited resources, the bag that this issue comes in is dual-use. It both protects the magazine on its journey to you (the buyer) and acts as the cover. Result: 8700 sheets of our normal cover stock saved.” Inside the magazine Patrick Burgoyne, CR’s editor goes at length to explain the reasoning behind what they did and reaches the climax of the explanation when he asks and answers himself the following question: “If you really care that much about the environment why use up all these resources publishing the magazine at all? Why not put it all on a website? We did. You can download this and every issue of CR as a PDF from www.e-cr.co.uk. ECR provides all the content without any of the paper, ink or chemicals, with a fraction of the energy and no physical distribution.” Go figure. If that is the case, why pay 5.70 British pounds for the printed magazine?
Mr. Magazine 
It all depends on why you’re getting the magazine. I pay for physical subscriptions to The Economist for myself and my friends so that we actually read it. But for technical publications, I prefer digital copies since they’re easier to archive.
In the world of computer gaming, online sites seem to be fully replacing printed magazines. But that’s a different issue – why get a magazine at all?