Free Astronomy Magazine March-April 2020

55 From 2000 onwards, the Internet has experi- enced a real explosion, reaching almost 4.5 billion users today. For many amateur as- tronomers, it has replaced all the other instru- ments that were indispensable for acquiring knowledge about the cosmos. Of course, the publishers took the opportunity to widen their audience, taking advantage of the new re- source in many ways and also starting to pro- duce digital publications. But there was, and continues to be, an unsolvable problem: the defense of the content. Defending content on the Internet is practi- cally impossible. Any publication, even the best protected, can be copied, stolen and vio- lated in any way. Only the most powerful in- stitutions can deal with this problem. It goes without saying that no amateur magazine can sell content on the Internet with any certainty that all readers are paying for it. When the In- ternet started to spread like wildfire, almost all astronomy magazines opened their own websites and, in a case of short-sighted self- harm, they started to publish for free, in real- time, the same news and the same images that they would have sold months later on news- stands or in the form of digital copies via the Internet itself. It is clear that this is a foolish policy and it does not matter if the same news published in print months later is more thor- ough: the news is old, and there are dozens more articles and images just coming online waiting to be read. Why waste time and money on reading content from months be- fore? Why buy my astroimages published in a magazine when that same magazine inserts them immediately, for free, in its gallery, where everyone can see them? This process of self-cannibalization of the paper magazines is irreversible, and all maga- zines in the same sector and the same lan- guage are damaged when only one of them chooses to offer news on its website. But, even if no magazine were to publish news online, there are hundreds of websites that publish only such news (an example for everyone: https://phys.org/space-news/sort/date/all/ ). When we launched our magazine in 2008, we Selling or giving away, that’s the dilemma...