UPDATE: THE 2600 DIGITAL PUBLISHING CRISIS

If you've been reading recent issues of 2600, you're likely familiar with some of the challenges we've been facing with certain publishing platforms. Specifically, Amazon's Kindle service has opted to discontinue supporting most magazine subscriptions. As we have many thousands of Kindle readers, this put us in a very precarious position and we have been scrambling to find solutions.

But first, an update from Kindle. We have been offered the chance to continue to be available on this platform as part of the Kindle Unlimited program, which is basically a way for readers to borrow all kinds of titles for a monthly fee. We would only be making around half of what we had been earning in the past. That could change if enough people read 2600 in this manner and, since there's no extra charge to read the magazine with this program, it's possible we could do even better if a larger number of Kindle Unlimited readers peruse our pages.

Our real goal, though, is for people to be able to subscribe to the digital edition of 2600 directly from our store. This seems like an obvious and logical thing to offer, but it's actually been quite complicated for a number of reasons.

While we recognize that many readers want the DRM-free PDF we've offered individually since 2018, the reality is that most other publishers don't embrace this. That has made it very difficult to find a way to offer DRM-free PDFs as a subscription, while keeping subscriber data secure and offering a seamless interface to our store. There simply is nothing on the market that offers what we want.

But the good news is that we've been developing a system in-house that we believe will address all of our needs without compromising subscriber privacy and without imposing any sort of content restriction. We believe we will have this in place in time for the Summer issue (due out in mid July) using DRM-free PDF and the industry-standard EPUB3 format that is compatible with virtually all e-readers and tablets. But for all of this to work, we will need a lot of support from our readers when the time comes.

To sum up, Kindle readers won't be cut off after all, but we will need many more of them to make up for Amazon's policy change. (We know there are quite a few readers who want us to remain available on the Kindle, which is why we're going to give this a shot.) For everyone else, we should finally be able to offer DRM-free PDF and EPUB3 subscriptions in the next couple of months, which will allow us to have full control over our subscriptions and not be at the mercy of huge companies that can change policy on a whim.

Thanks to everyone who has expressed concern and offered support since this all started in December. We believe we're on a good path. Stay tuned.