$99 per year that was trick, before regular membership got you every article. Now we have unlimited, must be something Ben Strano thought up. Yeah raise price on people who have been loyal to you.
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This has been around for quite a while. Did something recently happen to cause you to post?
To be honest, the 'Unlimited' product is poorly marketed and I have yet to figure out just what all it includes. Woodsmith has a similarly confusing offering.
It's like the copy was written by the same folks who sell cellular or cable TV contracts. Can't folks just say what they mean without trying to "wow" us?
I went straight from a regular subscription into "unlimited"and didn't notice any difference in access to content. Maybe if I drop unlimited I'll see what I would otherwise missing.
RUmphres,
I'm not sure what I did to be personally called out, but shoot me an email and let me know, with a little more detail, what the issue is. [email protected].
The price for Unlimited has been 99% for years now. Did you have a renewal issue?
Chip,
The main difference between Unlimited and the now unavailable combo subscription/membership is full access to the online archive, and the digital libraries here: https://www.finewoodworking.com/onlinearchive
That is the problem, the " unavailable membership", for years we got the subscription and we could see everything article on line. Now having a subscription does not mean anything. No Ben, you have not done anything to me personally, you are always introduced as the "on line" guy. So I have to figure your are responsible for this move. GeeDubBee, I know it's been around but it still is like they sneaked up and increased the price. I don't like the new arrangement. I am going to just read the magazine, they leave the same articles on too long anyway. Chip, yes drop your unlimited membership and see what you get. Not much. Robert Umphres
Why do some think that the world and everything in it ought to made and offered to them to their personal specification? FWW is a commercial enterprise selling information. The prices they charge will be, in this modern economy, determined by what they feel the market will bear. That in turn is determined by how much they sell: the number of customers.
In part it will also be determined by how many customers indicate they feel the price is too high by not renewing. (The usual method for so-indicating is not to buy it). I suppose you could try haggling for a lower price but that's not really the Western way, since it would drive the price down below viability once all & sundry discover that haggling has got someone else a lower price.
Personally I find the amount and quality of FWW information to be a very good bargain for that $99 a year. Probably like many, I spend more on coffee and again on chocolate, neither of which pleasures leave much residue after they've been consumed .... whilst FWW information leaves a lasting and highly valuable residue - my ability to perform all sorts of woodworking procedures well, not to mention dosh saved by the avoidance of naff tools. And then there's the entertainment, which is transitory.
******
When I feel there's insufficient new stuff to both educate and entertain me, I'll stop my subscription. Frankly, if they do half a dozen video series of a quality as good as the recent ones, with half a dozen written articles of interest, that's good value to me.
If it isn't to you, keep your money and spend it on something else. I don't recommend American chocolate, though. No. No. :-) Doing a Duchess of Pout about the price whilst abusing one of the footmen is not a good way to make a case for a lesser price, though.
Lataxe
A subscription used to mean that you get a certain number of magazines delivered to you for a certain length of time, for a specified price.
Oddly enough, that's what a subscription to Fine Woodworking still gets you. If you want the magazine archive, video workshops, etc, then you need to choose the Unlimited.
Thanks LatAx, and John, problem is that they started out giving you the magazine subscription and videos for the same price. Then changed it. After thinking about it I realized that I've been perfectly happy since the 70's without online magazine, my work has improved with books and taking apart old furniture rather that some makers shop tour. I know they have a lot of new stars(Chris Schwartz, Megan, Nancy and fellow Texan Phillip Morley) they have to pay. So I'll just live with the magazine. Chris Schwartz's book the Anarchist Tool Chest is about the best hand tool book you can buy. Sometimes if you just follow what other people are doing you don't ever find what you can do. Your designs just wind up looking like everyone else's. No $99 is my new declaration.
Rumph,
Like you I once relied on just the printed stuff. It was all there was if one couldn't afford "a class" or lacked access to some other more intimate mode of learning from experts who were also good teachers. But all my magazines eventually went into the charity shop as it became too difficult to wade through them all looking for a half-remembered article about the subject currently dominant in the WW shed. And the electronic, easily searchable, versions became available, initially on DVD then via the web.
Now I have a library of FWW stuff extracted from the DVDs and/or the website. I have many, many articles on the PC, organised in a large schema of my own choosing that allows me to rapidly find not just one article but many on any particular subject. I also have an annex in this library that contains pointers to non-downloadable FWW stuff that allows me to put in the url or title of the various information constructs, some of which are at least printable as a discrete series of 4 - 8 pages.
Sadly the FWW videos are not downloadable but only streamed. Nevertheless they contain a great deal that illuminate all sorts of WW procedures, designs, tool usages and much else that would be difficult or impossible to relate with just print. Recent videos, in particular, have been of high quality and are containers of minute levels of detail lacking in a lot of older videos as well as many of those videos currently shown via various Youtube channels.
That's my justification to myself for subscribing to the Unlimited FWW and paying that $99/year, which seems a very small amount for such a large and excellent resource. Of course, you may feel differently. However, price changes are part of life with all commodities so I can't really see any validity in an expectation that prices will stay the same, especially when the resource being bought improves.
****
I can't resist an aside about Chris Schwartz's "Anarchist Toolchest". It is an interesting and informative book but I can't see that "anarchy" has anything to do with it. Perhaps the use of the word "Anarchist" has a new and special meaning in the USA today? Lookit-my-different-from-you-ness. :-) Mr Schwartz is reviving many old WW methods, tools and understandings; reviving many aspects of lost WW traditions in fact. In this is he very conservative (in the old-fashioned sense of "preserving what works whilst evolving it to be better via practice", not the current meaning of "trash the planet and everyone else to keep my status").
Another thing I can't resist having a chuckle about is the notion that your designs shouldn't end up looking like everyone else's. Of course they should! Tables, chairs and various other items are meant to serve a function, which dictates certain forms. Woodworking is very traditional (as Mr Schwartz knows very well) precisely because new designs are rare, often not warranted and generally in the decorative rather than functional domain.
Of course, one may come across all sorts of "new designs" in the pages of FWW and various books portraying the output of the self-named "designer-makers". Often these are technical marvels of woodworking. Sometimes they are even functional. But so often they are, in reality, wood sculptures trying to become fashionable. Many remind me of the mad things seen going up & down catwalks, adored by the too-much-money-and-not-enough-sense fashion victims but generally regarded by most as the doodles of folk who have gone beyond eccentricity by several steps or even a great leap.
Lataxe
I don't want to hijack this thread but I strongly disagree with Lataxe's assertion that your designs should look like everyone else's. A good designer can follow the "form follows function" mantra and arrive at numerous unique design solutions that can excel functionally and aesthetically. My 2 cents.
M. Katzowitz,
Do I sense the beginnings of a pleasant discussion inclusive of disagreement and some interesting POVs and counter-POVs? I do hope so as I yearn for a return of the FWW forum to the lively and informative days of Knots. :-)
If you disagree with my assertion (which wasn't that everyone's designs should look exactly like everyone else's but rather that novelty for novelty's sake is often a redundant attempt at the construction of a decorative fashion) then show us some examples of furniture that is new! improved! containing new and beneficial functional improvements rather than the spurious addition of a fashionable "look".
Or justify the fashionable "look" for it's own sake.
I'm far from suggesting you can't do this; I'm prepared to be fully corrected in my current view of much designer-maker stuff as "the new gadrooning".
Here also is a confession that I myself prefer Arts & Crafts of the plainer ilk partly because of it's pared-away design but also because it has some decorative aspects masquerading as functional but which aren't really. For example, the over-engineered look of Cotswold Arts & Crafts which is appropriate for the farm carts it was copied from but a bit over-engineered in a dining table. And how to justify the style of the Greene & Greene I enjoy making, which is highly functional but undeniably decorative?
Also, those plainer styles of furniture are easier to make than the sculptured stuff. Yes. :-)
Anyone else have any views on furniture designing and the validity of the decorative as well as the functional? Anyone care to identify a recently-designed major functional improvement in a standard piece of furniture compared to it's forebears?
Lataxe, hoping for WW chatter and conversation.
Lataxe, You might want to start a thread for that...this one is still titled "unlimited membership".
And maybe make your posts shorter and lose the florid language. They're getting harder to follow.
Haaaa...half the time I have to re-read his posts to understand them, the other half I don't make it through them at all.
Give up the rhetorical gadrooning!? That's like asking Ray Pine to neglect the finale of balls and grasping claws on the bottom of his scuttle-legged chairs!
You lads will have to recall those modes of communication prevalent before the tweeting became a fashion. I can't do tweet as I prefers to impart some meaning. I can only suggest you eschew the Faecesbook and Twatter, with their short-little-attention-span verbal burbs, to develop or recall the patience to parse my pearls. Yes.
On the other hand, you can just ignore me. Your loss, mind. :-)
Lataxe
I'm not on the Facebook or Twitter, at all. I do Instagram, because, pictures. I read three to four books a week, and occasionally have to bail on one because the writing is poor. Good writing communicates ideas clearly and concisely.
Lataxe, I would be delighted to discuss our differing philosophies on design and creativity, but I don't want to hijack this thread. If you want to start a new one I'll be there!!!
Well I've said my bit, waiting now for Lataxe's new thread :)
John_C2,
You propose that: "Good writing communicates ideas clearly and concisely". That's James Joyce in the bin then! And all them poets, with their ambiguous allusions and allegories. Not to mention Larry Niven. (I will miss his obscure yet illuminating tales, though, despite not having to read every sentence three times to mentally sort out his queer syntax).
As for that Shakespeare! Bluddy Elizabethans, eh? :-)
Mind, you have a point: that some subject matters require clarity and a lack of ambivalence; questions concerning the ins & outs of a woodworking procedure, for example. But surely the tweet or other brief outbursts are even more inappropriate than a bit of florid language?
So many of these short little sentence responses seem to come without the dozen background parts, which the poster of the pithy parp leaves out apparently on the assumption that the enquirer should already know those dozen things and their relevance to his question.
It gets shorthanded to: "Don't overthink it". Cuh!
Once upon a time, a long time ago, when I worked (spit) at writing technical manuals concerning operations of mainframe computer systems, I learnt to be very explicit, unambiguous, concise and terribly awfully well-organised in the relating of the many ins & outs of the colossus. (If only some WW machine manuals were like that, eh)? One judged the success of the manual by the number of subsequent questions asked. If there were none, the manual was good.
Anyway, I LIKE to go on and on and on and on and [NO MORE ON-ING! - The forum drone monitor].
Lataxe
PS Mr JK, I will start another thread about the design and creativity matter, possibly just for us two ..... unless the tweeters can be persuaded to overthink it a bit, just to see what it feels like. :-)
I'm game, anyway you want to play it. I probably won't have much time today I have some family stuff going on.
You can call me Joel
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