Lessons from Feedback

Our users/readers sometimes email the Exact Editions support line, when they were intending to email the magazine's editorial team. We received such an email last night and I am pretty sure that the publisher of Permaculture and the e-mail's author will not mind if the message is shared more widely:

Dear Exact Editions team
I´ve been reading all year round your excellent Permaculture magazine Thank you very much I got it for free in your last year’s promotion. I’m a postgraduate student on Physical Anthropology with my thesis on Corn breeders from peasant families of highlands in rural Mexico. If by luck you still have the possibility to send it for free by mail or e-mail I will be much grateful, since it keeps me inspired. My income as teacher is minimal, my work hours long, and if you need a certified letter that I get it for free, I can send it. Nevertheless, thank you for your kindness, during all this year.

It is so good of 'Ana' to thank us for her magazine, but of course the thanks are due to Permaculture who not only make the magazine, they also had the clever, but wholly practical idea of sending sponsored subscriptions to ecological activists in other parts of the world who would never be able to afford a subscription to a print magazine priced for Western markets. It is a bit easy for us to forget, in the unsustainably privileged West, just how much education, culture and enjoyment can be packed into the magazine format.

As in the case of our totally blind reader of the Baptist Times, this is the type of feedback that leaves one pleased to be of service and completely impressed by the challenges that face our brothers and sisters. Humbled too, because obviously what matters to our readers is that they can read the magazine in its digital form and the magazine is what really matters to them. The platform ideally should be, as it really is for our blind readers, invisible. It is the magazines which matter. Exact Editions works best when our readers really do not notice the platform.