Just announced...a hard-copy option for the NC e-zine will be available via Amazon. This may be a concession to the sizable portion of the FNF faithful who are in the 55+ age range and have never quite gotten used to using a "tablet" or iPad to read entire issues of magazines. (That said, I can recall the discussions of this back in 2010 and how adamant a certain someone was about how reading on "a tablet" was the wave of the future and that hard copy for most magazines would soon be on its last legs, etc.)

What the FNF announcement carefully omitted was the price tag, which is a hefty $14.99 per (hard) copy. Given that little these days is left out of the NC Annual (as opposed to back in the day, when despite fewer editions per year there were annuals with higher page counts), the notion that folks will pay $60 a year to have hard copies of the material that will appear in the Annual for $25 (hmm, methinks that price is likely going up as well...) seems far-fetched.

Of course, the Annual is printed in black and white, and the e-zine will use full color...but film noir--at least classic film noir--is 95%+ black and white, so just how much color is there going to be in those e-zines that makes it worthwhile to (at least) double the unit price in order to have all the content?

Now with the ground starting to shift toward neo-noir, it could be that color is going to predominate for the FNF as they look toward capturing the next wave of aging hipsters (the 40-to-55 folks who may find the 70s-90s neo-noir filmography sufficient for their purposes). And, of course, the ads in the e-zine will be in color--perhaps a certain someone was convinced that more advertising $$ could be achieved with a print edition...

Of course, it's a shame that the entire back catalogue isn't being made available in hard copy as well. (There was no explanation provided as to why such is going to be the case.)

In any event, the risks here are most likely rather low, since print-on-demand will remove the up-front sting from a press run. But that price point still seems rather forbidding...