This decision is really a matter of trying to allocate our limited time and money as wisely as possible. Each issue of the Journal takes up about 55 Mb of disk space. If we converted all of the issues of the Journal that are only on cassette to MP3, the storage requirements from our web hosting company would cost us about $500 per year. So we would have to sell at least 100 back issues per year just to break even. And, sadly, we don't sell that many. Not nearly. Despite the wonderful content on products as old as 15 years (and in this world, that's ancient!), people seem reluctant to buy an old periodical. Part of the problem is that these back issues are hard to describe in advertising copy. Some of those back issues have one or two features that may be attractive to listeners, but many people are reluctant to purchase a back issue for one or two features. The issues that have a lot of good features often include so much variety that it is a challenge to hold people's attention long enough to explain why they would like this 12-year-old product.

And, quite candidly, not all of the old content is brilliant. So our plan is to take the best of the old material and repackage it into thematically organized Anthologies. Look, for example, at the contents of Volume 17 (from 1995). The Mardi Keyes interview will probably end up on an Anthology about family and youth culture; the Mark Slouka piece will probably be part of an Anthology on technology and culture. And Alan Jacobs on Patrick O'Brian? We'll probably have 3 or 4 Alan Jacobs Anthologies, since he's been a frequent guest.

We think that organizing our "vintage" interviews this way makes them more attractive to potential customers, which should justify the time it takes to repackage them (even though all of our back material has already been converted to digital format, we have to add information to the MP3 tags, prepare pdf files with bibliographic information, etc., averaging 2-3 hours of work per hour of content), as well as the cost of storage space. We estimate that about half of the material we produced in our first 10 years merits this sort of repackaging, which brings our storage costs to about $250 a year, which means we only need to sell 50 copies to break even, which we hope will be easy to do.

Back to main CAQs page