A few words about the publishing business “with them” and “with us”

    I want to share the observation I made yesterday morning in Helsinki. There is such a chain of R-KIOSKI stores in this city where they sell magazines and some snacks, coffee. In general, if we exclude the coffee-drinking component, then this is a direct analogue of our First Strip. In Helsinki, these newspaper and magazine stores are also available at every metro station. However, yesterday I decided to get curious about Linux magazines. Just recently, I, along with the editors of the Russian Linux Format, was glad that the magazine managed to break into the Front Page, and now the latest LXF numbers are seized like hot cakes. It is all the more interesting to compare the situation with the somewhat provincial Helsinki, which is an order of magnitude smaller than St. Petersburg in terms of population, and, in general, is at the margin of the European Union.
    We look into the R-KIOSKI pavilion and the first thing we see is that the magazines are not placed in one cabinet, but in several separate cabinets or racks, depending on the subject. IT and multimedia magazines are placed in a separate rack, on which we see the following:
    image
    Bottom left is the English Linux Format, the rest of the magazines I deliberately set forward. These are Ubuntu user, Linux Journal, Linux User and Developer, and Linux Magazine. That is, as many as 5 magazines, not counting a dozen analogues for PC and Mac. Magazines come from the UK and the USA and are sold “as is”, without being reprinted in Finnish (the country is still small). Prices are approximately in this range: 12-15 euros per room with a disk (however, there was no disk for Linux Journal, but it was still expensive). You can probably find these magazines cheaper in Helsinki, as R-KIOSKI most likely makes a good mark-up (The First Strip is also an expensive store). Theoretically, to receive English-language magazines in St. Petersburg, you can get an official subscription, but this in the end is quite expensive, especially when you consider the cost of delivery. Well, the delivery time.
    I looked through the diagonals themselves. Linux Format and Ubuntu user are unambiguously oriented to noobs, 80% of articles are reviews of distributions and software, the rest is a bit of analytics, a few serious articles on programming, debugging, etc. I liked the Linux Journal the least. The magazine is thin and basically chews on a boring topic for everyone: an overview and comparison of distributions. As if nothing had changed in 10 years. Linux User and Developer is a real find for those who are not just picking their system, but also actively writing crutch scripts, fixing bugs, and possibly participating in open source projects. Behind the duty holivar Fedora vs. Ubuntu has many articles for developers, including lessons on Mono, c #, ruby, and other interesting things. Linux Magazine is a thick solid magazine about everything, focused on all categories of users.
    The magnificent printing design common to all magazines was striking. Higher quality of both the paper itself and printing on it. As far as I could understand, in the West they had completely got off the offset and switched to digital printing on-demand. I forgot to find out the circulation, but I suspect that he cannot characterize the magazine’s penetration in a country where there is no editorial office. That is, there is one large circulation of the English version, which then diverges around the world. I wish she ever got to us :)

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