Snail Mail Gets Slimier

If you love your real life inbox as much as you do your inbox online, you need to know the postal rate hike affects you too! Big time. While we were madly untangling yarn from our cat's clutches, our good friend PR Couture was trying to remind us that the postal service is providing big discounts for big publishers, and laying the brunt of the cost on smaller magazines.

Obviously if you’re reading this, you’re not paying postage, but our Mari-sense says you subscribe to a mag or two from a smaller press. Now while the USPS monopoly on your indie faves' ability to deliver, might make your fist start to curl, you might consider that this monopoly has not always been a bad thing. By keeping rates uniform for both indie mags and big publishing houses, USPS has actually encouraged competition from smaller presses. For hundreds of years, they have wanted everyone to have the same ability to disseminate information with their service. Now thanks to a suggestion by Time Warner, not only do smaller publications have to struggle a little more with their postal rates, but fewer might enter the market.

For more information on what is facing these smaller magazines and how to help, check out the little stamp on your right, visit The Nation’s EIC blog post Big Business Invades Your Mailbox, and sign the petition.