why print?

You are probably wondering what we're doing publishing a print fanzine in the modern age. Well, let me explain ...

Once upon a time, I had a couple of Robotech websites hosted for free by an outfit called Xoom, who had decided to push the wholly unprofitable business model of hosting websites for anyone -- anyone at all -- of unlimited size. A couple of years later, with my two sites running and going a while, wouldn't you know it, Xoom's domestic operations were bought up by NBC, the TV network. Not long after this, NBC very wisely decided they didn't want to be paying for thousands of unlimited-sized websites that weren't bringing them any money. So, with ample warning but no mercy, NBC closed up all those free website accounts. Quickly, I jumped to another free host that had stupidly leapt upon the same business model, but their bandwidth was always tied up and I could never upload anything. I eventually landed in the account currently projecting the pixels you're staring at across the vast reaches of cyberspace, which gives me just enough hard disk space and bandwidth, which I pay something like $9 a month for. Fair enough.

The point of this story? Pixels are fleeting. Here today, gone tomorrow.

One day, I'm going to forget to pay my web hosting company, or they're going to close up shop, or they're going to be sold to some Korean conglomorate who just wants all those great big servers to run their massive multi-player RPG, or heck, maybe I'll be hit by a bus and that'll be the end of that. The point is, this website will be gone one day. This much is certain. But as long as Emissaries' subscribers and their heirs treat the fanzines well, every single copy of Emissaries can survive us all.

With proper care, print is eternal. No giant company's going to come along and turn off your book. There's no switch on it. You can kill one copy, but as long as another survives, it lives on.

Around the same time I had my two Xoom-hosted websites running, there was a fellow operating a fantastic Robotech comedy website called Robotech X. Like my creaky old sites, it is now lost to the ages, which is an absolute crying shame. There was some seriously hilarious crap there. However, not all of it is lost -- a good friend of mine wrote a series of bits for that site called the Robotech Variety Hour, and years later he submitted revised versions of these bits to former Emissaries publisher Evan Cass. These comedy bits, lost to the internet at large, live on in the collections of every Emissaries subscriber who's treated their fanzines right.

I'm not trying to say that print is totally superior to the internet. The internet is a fabulous resource, vast and boundless -- a gateway to more information than any print library could store. Personally, though, I trust print more than any electronic resource. I would much rather tote around a book than a funky electronic device. I would rather commit my thoughts to a scrap of paper than to a Notepad or Word document. I don't store my friends' phone numbers in my phone, or in some electronic address book doo-dad, or even on my computer -- I store them on Post-It notes next to the phone mounted on my kitchen wall. After all, no power outage or dead battery is going to erase those Post-It notes. And if someone wanted to pull a prank on me, change one of those numbers, it would take some work to rewrite my Post-Its so I wouldn't notice. But to fiddle with some electronic gadget? All it'd take is a little know-how and a little luck.

Maybe this all sounds a bit silly, like a cranky old man of twenty-four shaking his fist at the new generation rising up with all their fancy-pants technology. But keep this all in mind when your favorite Robotech fanfic author goes off the deep end six months from now and wipes his work off the internet because he's decided to reject his past of writing tales of violence and has rededicated his life to Christ, while I sit here with my collection of Emissaries back issues, able to reread my pal Ian Melton's post-McKinney opus The Regulators until my eyes go bad and my brain turns to mush.

Not the image I wanted to go out with, but you get the idea, right?

Jonathan L. Switzer
May 2, 2005