What is printernet?
Printernet is software which turns things you want to read into personalized print magazines. You can curate beautiful print magazines from your read-later list on demand or set up a weekly print schedule to auto-compose and print magazines for you. We also just launched our “doorstep delivery” option which lets you curate your issue like normal, but then we print it, bind it and mail it right to you.
Printernet has had several iterations, but the version today is the realization of the original vision: waking up to a fresh stack of personalized reading selections waiting for you without you doing a thing, just like the pot of coffee waiting for you in the kitchen.
Why did you start it?
I first started Printernet in 2022. I’d gotten into the habit of printing out all the blogs, substacks, and essays I wanted to read and stapling them together. I wanted the same experience of sitting at my favorite cafe with a good book, but for all the great writing happening online. I noticed that having a bounded printout laying around the house helped me pick it up and read more. And also to read more deeply, without the ever present opportunity of opening a new tab.
Did it change what online writing you were reading?
Yes definitely, when you intend to print something you naturally raise the standards for your own attention. On screens, the cost of viewing something is quite low, so low-quality or shorter-form things can compete for your time. When I started using Printernet myself, I gravitated towards longer pieces and also started to keep an eye out for pieces about related themes. This helps me explore a particular interest or topic from different perspectives in one bounded issue.
What happened with the articles after you read them? Did you bin them? Or store them somehow?
This has varied a bit. There are certain issues that feel wrong to recycle or get rid of. I have a few dozen Printernet issues around the home, sitting on our bookshelves or in our magazine basket. Sometimes I'll revisit an issue at random and find myself newly enthralled with an issue I first printed in 2023 or something. After reading some issues, I'll bring them to a friend or sibling who I feel might like it.
When did it evolve into more than a “home-cooked app”?
After printing and binding my own reading for a few weeks, I stumbled into a lot of interesting aspects of reading in print that felt quite refreshing. Then I stumbled into a tweet from someone saying they’d been doing the same and began to wonder if others might enjoy this as a service. That was the first Printernet reader, Eashan. He ended up being the first person to send me money over the internet!
Printernet started as a very handmade service. Users would send me the links to their reading selections and I’d lay them out in Adobe InDesign, print them at my house, and mail each issue myself. Back then it took a few days to make each issue! This version went on for nearly two years. Over that time I wrote my own software to automate the process of formatting each issue and ditched InDesign, bought more printers, and a coil-binding machine. I physically compiled and mailed nearly 1,000 magazines all around the US and to dozens of other countries too.
Did you ever read any of these 1,000 magazines you made for others? If yes, were there any interesting ways people were curating their magazines? Something that felt more than a selection of random articles?
Oh yes, quite a bit of them. And I discovered tons of amazing writers through other Printernet readers. Most notably: Henrik Karlsson, Ted Gioia and Ava. It's only half-joking to say that Printernet is really just a way to direct very interesting writing discovered by curious readers straight to my inbox (we designed the "public library" in the app to make that benefit explicit and available to everyone).
Some readers definitely tend to take a random sampling of pieces (I use this variety issue approach a lot), while others are clearly in the midst of some new obsession and have 7 articles around the same interest. For example, one reader recently compiled an entire issue around the symbolism of women in Greek Mythology.". It has also been curious to see a subset of readers who seem to believe that especially technical writing is best read in print—their issues resemble manuals. Another common approach is the "best of" curation. Folks have created issues with 7 Paul Graham essays for instance, or even the best of their own writing to share with others.
Are you thinking this mainly as a single-player experience where people create their own magazines? Or are there ways where people can be inspired by each other?
I think a lot of the best software works for both modes. But with Printernet a ton of the most exciting parts are seeing what other curious smart readers are reading and recommending. You can maintain a list of your current recommendations and browse others' lists. Readers can also post a "request for a recommendation" where they specify what they're looking for ("Something about the charm of the internet or software from the 90s") and get personal recs from others.
You can also publish a full curated issue to our "magazine rack" for others to print or order and check out issues others have assembled.
Another core decision made early on was to make the reading people save to Printernet public by default. Though we still support private saves, most essays or articles land in our shared library so everyone makes Printernet a more interesting place to be.
A favorite (unexpected) ritual of mine is to wake up with a coffee and look through the Printernet library to see what others are reading. Here are some things I saved this morning: "Why the internet needs a memory", "The Final Lap, Or What It's Like to be 89", and "Why we like things".
Who or what inspired you?
So many people, so many projects. To name a few: Craig Mod (his concept of media with “edges”), Kevin Kelly (“don’t be the best, be the only”), Rahul Vohra (his concept from superhuman of creating mini “games” within your products), video rental stores and the mail-only era of Netflix, Robin Sloan (how he blurs the worlds of software and old media, apps as home cooked meals), telephone poles overcrowded with DIY posters, Yancey Strickler (read his piece “how to build a new thing”), RSS, Jason Fried and DHH (how intentional they are about 37Signal’s structure and what they choose to optimize for), postcards, HTML energy and that whole crew, 2000s era Apple (revisit the early promises of the iPad, before the pervasiveness of iPad babies), Sari and Gabriel at Sublime, Wikipedia and The Internet Archive, bookstore “shelf talkers”, eReaders and eInk, the radio and fax machines, the Paris Review and New Yorker, newspaper classifieds…
I think of Printernet as belonging to the Charles Broskoski category of “Personal Businesses”: businesses that blur the line between being a company and a “side project”. I am personally obsessed with curation, recommendations, and reading all the great stuff on the internet. So Printernet has primarily been about making something I want for myself. But it has also found thousands of other readers over the years who have helped make it much more interesting for me and for one another.