Brian Walton
I signed up on the first release before the discussion. I've had multiple "spam" emails from them and even tried to unsubscribe and got an email after that.
Did you select preferences, and uncheck ALL notifications available from issuu? That should stop all emails.
I do not always use the same computer or same browser. It is more than one extra click, as in this case, you have to actually create an account, not just enter a bogus email address and make up a password, then sign in with what you created.
I am able to access it from iPad, Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Android with one account. The platform remembers the account info, so after clicking on the forum link to the issue, it really does take only one extra click to download as PDF.
Cake could load the thing for download with google drive and create a link to that. Which could be easily updated if an error was found by replacing the version.
Then there would need to be a pair of links, a pair of updates if a change occurs, etc.
The bigger issue is it takes a tremendous amount of effort to put out a monthly magazine with more pages of editorial than many commercial magazines. Justifying that amount of time requires making sure that it's providing the content people want, and can eventually reach an audience wider than those people who see a link in an update announcement. (Remember that the forum is only a fraction of all Cakewalk users, and there were constant issues with the previous eZine where people didn't know where to find it, or didn't know the place to find a link was in Rolling Updates, etc.) Now people will know that it's always available in one place, it can be embedded, and it works on any platform.
Also with issuu, we have anonymous metrics on which articles get read the most as well as overall circulation. After each issue we do a post-mortem to gauge article popularity. We need that data if we want the magazine to serve the community in the best way possible. Granted, if you download the PDF from issuu, we do not get that information. Fortunately, enough people read the online version that we can draw at least somewhat valid conclusions about how to improve the magazine.
Tech+Music is free, can be read online on any platform, and be downloaded as a PDF; also, I would like to think it's a pretty high-quality publication. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask the community to do something in return that helps us improve the magazine by knowing what interests our readers, and also lays the groundwork for expanding it in the future. I admit that is a biased viewpoint because as the person responsible, I want it to be popular. Otherwise, I would need to cease publication because I can't justify the time, which is what happened last time.