Editor's Note
Healthy Printing
We were contemplating this month’s Editor’s Note, preliminarily titled "Why, Oh Why, Can’t Bluetooth Ever Just Work Right? Why? WHY?" when we were distracted by an incoming e-mail message from a reader. He asked why the magazines are mailed to him in plastic bags. "A printed version is bad enough for the planet, but to wrap it in a bag too?"
First of all, we commend the reader for having the courage to write to us in the first place. We can be a bit scary—some people send letters to us and are never heard from again. Second, he raises a good point—what is this magazine (and its sister publication, TechNet Magazine) doing to help conserve natural resources? We gave our printers a call.
MSDN Magazine sends the magazine in a bag when there’s extra material to go with it—a CD, poster, or some other sort of insert. As you’ve probably noticed, we give you a lot of content for your buck, and sometimes it’s printed so that it’s big enough to fit on your wall and be seen from a distance. If there’s nothing but the magazine one month, then it’s not mailed in a plastic bag. And you don’t have to throw the bag away—it’s made from recyclable materials.
The paper we use is partially recycled. Our printer tells us that 100% bleached, recycled paper is actually worse for the environment (the bleaching process is quite harsh), and it’s not sturdy enough for our printing press (so we’d waste a lot more paper). The portion of the paper that’s not recycled comes from new growth that’s managed by the paper mills, so they’re not clearing old forest for our paper.
The ink we use is soy-based. Way back in the old days, ink used to be petroleum-based. Newspapers eventually realized that this was not the best option, either for the pocketbook or the environment. Soy-based ink was developed as an alternative. Unlike petroleum inks, soy-based inks are made from soybean oil, a renewable resource. Not only does soy ink have no reported effects on the environment, it can actually be beneficial—half the soybeans grown in the United States don’t require irrigation, so they may put less of a burden on the environment than most other vegetable-based oils. Soy-based ink can often provide brighter, crisper colors than the old petroleum-based ink as well. (At least this is what Wikipedia told us, and they’re never wrong!)
Many readers have noticed that our paper is heavier than most other magazines—that’s by design. High-quality inks and paper provide a publication that’s easier to read and that stands up to repeated flipping of pages. Having good paper is important for us because we want to make sure the magazine isn’t just some throwaway. If you get a daily newspaper, in a week you have a big stack of newsprint that you have to stick in a blue bin and leave by the curb for pickup. You can only hope that it’s being routed to a proper recycling plant.
People who receive MSDN Magazine, on the other hand, tend to keep it for a long time, years on average. We design our topic coverage to be relevant now, and even more so a year or two down the road. Since people hold onto their issues for a long time, we build each issue to last, both physically and in terms of content. When’s the last time you picked up a three-year-old issue of People Magazine because you remembered a celebrity gossip piece that has just become relevant to your work?
Of course, not every aspect of MSDN Magazine is recycled. We strive for 100% new-growth content, harvested from the finest authors and experts in the field. We flash-freeze the content and rush it to press so that you’ll be proud to present it on your dinner table or, more likely, your office desk.
We will note with some disdain, however, that no one seems to be able to tell us why Bluetooth just never works quite right for us. Maybe we’ll save that topic for another Editor’s Note.
Thanks to the following Microsoft technical experts for their help with this issue: Paul Andrew, Tom Archer, Kevin Boske, Jonathan Caves, Tom Christian, Derek Del Conte, Joe Duffy, Shawn Farkas, Dan Hartop, Jim Johnson, Brian Jones, Don McCrady, Cyrus Najmabadi, Joe Self, Ayman Shoukry, Dharma Shukla, and Joel West.
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