

Feedback on my new project, ShelfMade.net - mikesabat
http://shelfmade.net/
The concept is designed for people that check Reddit and YC News 10 times a day. <p>Find a worthwhile article that is too long to read right now? Just shelv it and get back to work.
======
uuilly
The long tail for magazines? Sounds cool but I'm worried about a
contradiction... Yes the market for tree based magazines is still HUGELY HUGE
and you could make a lot of money creating lots of special interest mags the
big guys ignore. But... If your audience is web-savy enough to discover your
service, they probably get most of their news from the web and they don't care
about magazines.

Your ideal customer would be web-savy but their end subscribers would not be.
I'm too absorbed in the www to imagine who that may be, but I'm sure they're
out there. On news.yc though, you'll probably get a bunch of people saying
"why not just read a blog?"

Godspeed.

~~~
mikesabat
Understood and I definitely agree - to a point. I get ALL my news and
entertainment online. Sometimes I just need to get away from the computer
screen.

I read Seth Godin's blog everyday, but I still bought Small Is the New Big. I
still bought and read The Long Tail although half the book was online.

------
Alex3917
I'm not quite sure I get it. What am I supposed to do with all of my
magazines? Give them to friends? Sell them?

It would be cool if you could get a contract with Starbucks/Borders to put the
most popular magazines in the store each month. That way it would give users
an incentive to create. Granted, getting distribution like that would be quite
difficult.

~~~
mikesabat
Thanks for the comment.

Users get paid when people shelv their articles and they spread ideas - same
incentives as blogging.

Of course we would love to be in retail eventually, and it may be possible. I
think the cooler aspect is that you can subscribe to the magazine that PG
builds (eventually) or you can build a magazine for your employees to read.

Instead of Chris Anderson choosing what articles are important this month, you
can subscribe to Noah Kagan's or a friend from college's magazine.

~~~
Alex3917
To be honest the idea itself doesn't seem especially sexy or exciting to me,
although if it's well executed I could see myself using it. It seems novel
enough to be worth a try.

That being said, I'm not sure how easy it will be to translate blog posts into
print in a way that's visually appealing. A lot of bloggers are big into using
whitespace, which would look pretty weird in a print medium. And often there
is meaning conveyed by the whitespace itself, so it's not necessarily easy to
reformat posts into nice paragraphs.

~~~
mikesabat
Hey Alex, If I'm understanding you correctly, the answer is that we aren't
printing web pages - blogs. We are taking the text, reformatting and putting
the content into a magazine layout. We're not simply clicking print and
binding.

------
joe
Being the constantly proofreading sort, I'm not sure why you're capitalizing
random words and phrases, like "Print" and "On Demand".

Also, I really didn't want to fill in my name, email, and URL, but I clicked
the "Yes!" box to see what would happen. Now I have an overlay window
occupying the center of my screen, with no way to get rid of it save by
entering the aforementioned info. That's annoying.

Now that that's out of the way, one question: Will people actually pay for
this? I mean, pretty much the only time I read a print magazine is if I'm
really bored at the airport. Otherwise, the Web is all I need.

~~~
mikesabat
Known and working on it. Sorry.

~~~
sankaman
Seems the issue is fixed. Nice Job!

------
gscott
I knew a lawyer once who had a newsletter on gaming laws and casino's would
subscribe at a cost of several hundred dollars a month. If you could hook up
with these specialized newsletters that have high value and you can give the
current newsletter a better presentation (remember the people writing these
are not Quark express addicts) I think you could have a good business.

Also another idea is with meetup.com, they have a number of social groups who
might be interested in a quarterly magazine that would be great for keeping
memories in this digital world where pictures loose there context when stored
in a directory, the only thing you have to keep the context is the directory
name... and storage medias have a tendancy to fail or in case of media cards
get lost.

------
german
looks good, here are my recommendations:

I like the folded corner in the right to go to the next page, but i have no
way to go to the previous page (besides the back button in firefox), maybe you
should add a previous folded corner in the left.

Another thing that I'm seeing is some overlapped text, just for curiosity I
checked it with firebug and noticed that the footer has a -30 px margin top,
you should change it, there is a lot of overlapped text, watch your negative
margins and the position absolute of some elements.

Hope that helps.

~~~
mikesabat
Thanks gman. What browser were you viewing.

~~~
german
Firefox 2.0.0.6

If you need any help with CSS just ask =)

------
wastedbrains
Cool concept if you could get a partnership or two to print just all the
highest rated articles each month that could be a cool magazine. I only buy
mags when flying. I frequently wish I had some of the best posts printed out
just for my eyes or to bring with me while waiting somewhere, reading in bed
(laptops aren't comfortable)

~~~
mikesabat
This is what we are building the site for. Who decides the best posts? To
start off, we are giving you the power to do that.

Once this becomes an option (receiving blog posts in print) it changes the way
you surf. A 3 page article that looks cool, shelv it and go back to work. Guy
Kawasaki interview that you want to read late, shelv it and go back to work.
PG essay that you know you want to read again - shelv it.

The Internet become about finding great articles, and only reading the short
ones.

------
almost
I have no idea what it what it does and I can't be bother to read all that
text. You should assume most people who come to your site will be like me and
leave without ever even finding out what it is you do.

------
inklesspen
This yellow card inviting me to sign up to your mailing list appears on top of
the text I was reading, with no obvious way of dismissing it. So I closed the
window.

~~~
mikesabat
Sorry, fixed

~~~
inklesspen
Nope, you didn't fix it. The slightly-tilted yellow card image (the one you
click to get the actual form) still blocks my reading with no apparent way to
dismiss it.

------
gersteni
Have you thought about the IP issues? Printing out other people's content and
putting it into a magazine is an obvious case copyright infringement.

~~~
mikesabat
Yep, it is opt in for publishers and we pay them every time someone grabs an
article and puts it in the magazine.

------
adnam
Ahh, a fellow baker ;-)

------
curi
increase font size, observe breakage

