Puzzles Karen Perez Well folks, here we go again. Home Power is again at a crossroad. The time has come for a major change in the appearance of Home Power. We know the first reaction of many will be, "Oh no, they've sold out and gone glossy." This decision was not made lightly. It took several weeks of round 'n round within our own crew to reach this decision. We're not moving to offices in New York. We've not sold out to a big publishing house. The content and subscription price WILL remain the same. We're still in our techno-primitive household here on Agate Flat. We're the same demented crew. Why Change? The reasons are many and complicated. Getting the info out to more folks, newsstand sales, advertisers, and environmental impact are the biggies. Why worry about getting out on newsstands? Many of you would not be reading this if it weren't for our being on newsstands. Many of you might not have picked up Home Power without the color cover. Many people tell us how hard the information found in Home Power is to find. Many newsstand buyers won't give us a chance without the "look". Our newsstand sales have grown 175% in the last year. This could easily triple or quadruple, with the right appearance. Why worry about advertisers? They help pay the bills and give us all a much broader selection of products and services to choose from! Many of our advertisers have complained about their logos filling in and muddy looking photos. Some of these advertisers won't advertise again until this problem goes away (ie. print quality improves), some potential advertisers won't even give us a try. Advertisers also want to reach as many potential customers as possible. So we are again back to newsstands and appearance. This brings us around to environmental impact. I have spent many hours on the phone talking to environmentally conscience magazines, paper mills, ink manufacturers, and environmental organizations about this issue. Many more hours have been spent digesting literature from all of the above. This move will reduce the environmental impact. This is complicated so read on! A very short printer primer Currently the insides of Home Power are printed on an open web press . This type of press does not have a heater to help dry the ink as the newly printed paper comes out of the press. The amount of ink that soaks in to the paper is hard to control. Newspapers use open web presses. This type of press uses giant 5000 pound rolls of paper. It currently takes two plus of these giant rolls for our 15,000 press run. The type of paper that open webs can run are limited. The covers are printed on a sheetfed press. This type of press does have driers and produces a much finer looking print job. The limit here is the type of paper used. Uncoated recycled papers soak up a lot more ink and the colors look darker. The move we want to make is to a heatset, computer controlled web press. This type of press does have heaters and much more control of the amount of ink that is laid down on the paper. It allows a much wider choice of paper. It also means much finer halftones (photographs) and much cleaner type. Most magazines use heat set web presses. We are also planning to move to a different type of binding. We are at the ragged edge of the saddle stitch (stapled) binding technology we have been using. The machinery cannot gracefully handle 116 pages. The image on the page appears crooked and sometimes because of this "slipping" we have come very close to losing parts of pages. The binding we are moving to is called perfect bound. This binding has a spine. The machines that do this type of binding can easily handle our page count and gives us room to grow. The paper puzzle We have made no firm decision on just what paper we will be moving to, still gathering information. We have learned a lot though. The main problem with "glossy" clay coated paper is public perception. Clay coated paper is between 28-40% coating by weight, that means less wood fiber is used. The coating is made from calcium carbonate, starch and clay. Coated stock can have a much higher postconsumer paper content and still be strong enough to be run through the high speed rollers of the web presses without tearing. The clay coating helps strengthen the paper. Coated paper does not soak up as much ink. For the cover, we are currently looking into a 70 pound coated paper that contains 75% postconsumer fiber made by a non-chlorine mill. The bleaching of the fibers is accomplished with oxygen instead of chlorine. Chlorine bleaching forms dioxins, a nasty toxic waste This coated paper is 60% wood fiber and 40% coating. We are also researching a 50% recycled (between 15-20% postconsumer paper) super calendered paper for the interior. This paper has less of a coating and is not as shiny. This paper is 72% wood fiber and 28% coating. Clay coated paper can be recycled, but it's not accepted everywhereÄyet. This is slowly changing as more people demand recycled paper and as more recycled mills are built. The demand for the so called mixed paper (magazines, the dreaded junk mail etc.) is expected to quadruple within the next year. The reason that the demand is expected to increase so radically is because of the increasing number of recycled paper mills. If we all continue to do our bit and demand recycled paper more and more recycled paper mills will be built. Inks We have used only vegetable oil inks for the last couple of year. We will continue to use low volatile organic compound (LVOC) inks. Even though vegetable inks are more environmentally safe than "dead dinosaur" types of ink they still contain between 6- 10% nasty stuff in the form of heavy metals. So the less ink used, the better and we're back around to coated paper which absorbs less ink. Putting the puzzle together It's a pretty complicated puzzle. We want to keep everyone happy. We want to be environmentally conscientious. We want renewable energy to spread. It's a real juggling act. Is this selling out? We don't think so and hope you won't either. I'd be happy to discuss this in more detail. Just give me a call at 916-475-3179, but be prepared, printing & paper is my version of "nerd". Karen