The Print Edition Costs an Email

TL;DR: All 28 field guides now come in a print edition, typeset like the Sunday paper, black nameplate and all. The web versions stay free, no wall, same as always. The PDF costs your email address, and the form says so before you type. That’s the whole deal.

The trade, on the tin

The field guides have been free to read since the first one went up, and nothing about that changed today. What changed is a small form at the top of each one: drop your email, and the guide lands in your inbox as a PDF. The same drop puts you on the weekday brief, and the form tells you that up front, because a gate you discover after the fact is a trap.

A fair gate names its price where you can read it.

I’ve unsubscribed from a hundred lists I never remember joining. Every one of them taught me what I didn’t want to build.

Why an email is the price

This network runs on one belief: the list is the only asset a writer actually owns. The site can get outranked, the socials can get throttled, but the list walks with you. So when I give away the most useful thing I make, I ask for the one thing that compounds.

The PDF pulls its weight. It’s the version you can hold, print, and mark up on paper, set in the same nameplate and type the emails carry, right down to the numbered sections. It cost me the typesetting, it costs you a hello.

Built on rails that already existed

The build took an afternoon, mostly because the hard parts were standing before I sat down. The delivery email rides the same rail as everything else I send. Point the typesetting script at a guide, and out comes the broadsheet. A manifest keeps the form honest, so it can never promise a file that doesn’t exist yet.

Some details I cared about more than anyone will notice. If you’re already on the list and want a PDF, you get the PDF, because you asked for a file, not a second membership. There are caps so nobody can point the form at somebody else’s inbox and hold the button down. And the files aren’t locked in a vault, search engines are just asked to look away. If you’re determined enough to dig up a bare URL, you were never going to type your email anyway, and I’m not building prisons for readers.

Twenty-eight guides went to press today. We’ll see who says hello.