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I have yet to master the challenge of reading every single
page of any e-zine before it disappears at the end of a month.
A paper magazine can be set aside until I find time to finish
an issue, even months or years after its cover date has expired.
I tend to earmark significant stories with paper clips or
yellow sticky notes that will last, well, forever. Reading
an e-zine, I'm never certain that I'll get to the end of a
story before the screen freezes or the computer crashes.
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Shoot,
I even miss seeing all of the ads that I used to complain
about. I don't even know what I'm missing on whatever
screen pages I don't get around to clicking open by the end
of a month. I've yet to see an old-fashioned ad index appear
in these e-zines, directing me to the latest innovations from
advertisers. As an online advertiser myself (insert shameless
plug here for HotRodNostalgia.com), I find it extremely frustrating
to click onto every page of every article, searching for my
own ad. Surely this is one old-school feature that1s within
the capabilities of present-day technology, eh, Mr. Publishers?
One old habit that's impossible to break is the collecting
of printed pages. I find myself running reams of white paper
through the laser printer to capture e-zine articles and photos
before the month runs out and a new issue erases the old.
Alas, my stapled-and-binder-clipped stack of laser-printed
sheets neither look nor feels like a "real" magazine
-- but at least I can apply sticky notes. Perhaps electronic
publishers will eventually improve reproduction quality by
offering PDF-type downloads of each page (as many manufacturers
do with their online catalogs). If and when that happens,
I'll be tempted to buy a cheap binding machine and adhesive
spine strips, then print out every page in the e-zine. Beginning
with the cover, I'd stack one page on top of the next, then
bind them all up as a complete package.
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like what drag racing's pioneer
publishers were doing 50 years ago, doesn't it? 
EDITOR'S NOTE: I've decided to send Dave a bottle of
ink and some Big Indian tablet paper to smell and fondle while
he's reading the electronic pages of DRO. I do want to remind
him that DRO (and as far as I can tell only DRO) has archived
every issue of the magazine including the updates since the
first issue in September 1999. Any issue or story can be read
anytime just by clicking on the archive icon. You can even
get specific stories by utilizing the "Google" function.
As for the fuzzy type and photos, well, I can only attribute
that to either Dave's 20-year-old Mac monitor or perhaps the
ingestion of some of that fabled California herb prior to
reading the mag. They look good on my 2005 Dell, dude. I was
going to have every issue printed on paper for his archives
but the staff revolted at that suggestion. Instead we're saving
a tree and installing the entire 60 issues of DRO on a single
disc and shipping it to Dave by FedEx, unless he insists on
delivery by Pony Express just like in the good ol' days.
-- JB
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