Subscribe on any day of the month and the current digital edition is yours immediately.
Until this week, a subscription that began after our print mailing cutoff on the 8th started with the following month’s issue. That made sense for print, where the mailing list closes and goes to the printer on a fixed date. It made no sense at all for digital, and starting today it no longer applies.
Every new subscription now includes the current issue’s digital edition, available the moment you subscribe, whatever day of the month that happens to be. No cutoff, no waiting, nothing to request.
What changes, and what doesn’t
Digital editions. Your subscription opens with the current issue, in your account right away. Every issue after it publishes to your account on release day. This applies to Digital Only and Print+Digital subscribers alike.
Print editions. The mailing cutoff on the 8th still stands, because it has to. The Gazette is printed and mailed in a single batch each month, and once that list goes to the printer there’s no way to add someone to an issue already headed for the post office. Subscribe after the 8th and your first printed issue is the following month’s. The difference now is that you won’t be waiting to read in the meantime.
Why we did it
Print has real constraints. Paper gets cut, folded, boxed, and handed to the post office on a schedule, and a mailing list has to close before any of that can happen. Digital has none of those limits, and there’s no reason to make it behave as though it does.
The Gazette has always been a magazine you do something with. Type in a listing, load a disk, chase down a hardware mod. That works best when the issue is in front of you while the idea is still fresh, not four weeks later. If a cover story is what brings you in, you should be reading it that night.
So the digital edition now runs on its own schedule instead of borrowing print’s. Subscribe whenever you like and start reading immediately. The print copy follows when the presses do.
Not a subscriber yet? Subscribe at shop.computesgazette.com and start reading tonight.