Support Your Local Amiga Magazine

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                     Support Your Local Amiga Magazine
  By Robert Davis                                          rdavis@nyx.net
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   The purpose of this article is to persuade you to support the last
remaining Amiga magazine published in North America.

   Look at this list:
     AmigaWorld
     AmigaWorld Tech Journal
     Avid
     Compute's Amiga Resource
     Amiga Transactor
     AC's Tech/Amiga
     The Sentry
     Ahoy! Amiga
     AmigoTimes
     .info

   And probably I have missed a few.  Those were all Amiga specific slick
magazines which were published in North America and which are now gone. 

   There is only Amazing Computing left, and I urge you to subscribe to
that magazine.  In Usenet news groups, questions appear every day about
where to purchase Amiga hardware, software, and accessories.   Most of the
replies come from people who look up the answers in Amazing Computing.  AC
is the only paper magazine left where one can find advertising aimed at the
Amiga community.

   If the retailers don't have a market, or don't think they have a market,
they will vanish from the Amiga scene.  Advertising and sales to customers
are completely dependant upon one and the other.  Without a place to
advertise to the whole Amiga community, the retailers will not sell their
products, and the products will follow the retailers to invisibility. 

   But you say, you read Amiga Report to get the news.  Of course, but AR
is different.  AR is distributed electronically, and is sent out as an
AmigaGuide or HyperText Markup Language file.  Just how many people other
than those who already have an Amiga can read AmigaGuide files?  How many
people without a computer can read files in HTML?  Amazing Computing
appears on news stands, and keeps the Amiga name before the public.

   One part of the strategy to keep Amiga computers available is to get
people who don't own Amigas to buy new ones.  If the computer buying public
does not even know that the machine exists, they will not even consider
purchasing an Amiga.  So simply keeping the name before the public is most
important, and if you subscribe to AC, you will help that effort.

   If your favorite news stand does not carry AC, then ask them to do so. 
They just might take a few copies, and someone who does not know about our
favorite computer might see it and be impressed.

   What about the British magazines?  There are still several, and one
supposedly publishes a North American edition.  But I have only seen one
copy of that magazine, and it belonged to a subscriber.   So far, I have
never seen that magazine on a news rack, and therefore I must conclude that
Amazing, which has been published since the middle 1980s, is more important
to the North American success of the Amiga.

   The British editions of those magazines look good, and are actually
available in many bookstores.  But the advertising does not cater to the
market in the United States or Canada. 

   I certainly don't work for Amazing Computing, and the only time they
ever published an article of mine was nearly two years ago in their now
discontinued AC's Tech.  But I have a stake in the success of the Amiga,
and therefore I have a stake in the success of Amazing Computing.  You do
too, whether you realize it or not.

   Oh, yes.  Their address and telephone number:

   Amazine Computing/Amiga
   PIM Publications
   PO Box 2140
   Fall River MA 02722
   ($27/year US, $34/year Canada)
   508-678-4200  800-345-3360

[In all fairness to Mr. Davis, and in no way to demean Amazing Computing,
but there is also the Amiga Computing US version as well, intended to
replace Amiga World.  True, it's not quite the same.  They can be reached
as edit@acomp.demon.co.uk.  -Jason]

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