An open public beta of the service launched this week following a six-month closed beta project with some 50 users ‘trying hard to break the system’.
For £4.99 per copy users can use a tool in their browser to select content that they want to include in their bespoke printed newspaper. The tabloid format product is offered in 8pp-24pp paginations, with users typically producing 20-24pp papers.
According to The Newspaper Club PaperLater is “similar to ‘read it later’ services like Instapaper,Pocket or Readability, but delivered to your home in a beautiful newspaper”.
Production is handled by The Newspaper Club’s existing digital print partner Stroma in Southall, West London, using its Oce inkjet web press.
The public beta will be rolled out slowly and will initially be limited to the UK but Newspaper Club head of engineering Tom Taylor said that the core technology for taking the online content and automatically producing a printed layout could also be deployed in other incarnations.
“Newspaper Club is about empowering independent publishing," said Taylor. “We’re open to discussion around the use of the layout technology. PaperLater is the first product to be built on top of that technology, there will be others.”
An earlier version of the technology was used in collaboration with The Guardian to produce The Long Good Read, a weekly paper distributed at the newspaper’s pop-up coffee shop Guardian Coffee at BoxPark in Shoreditch.
Taylor said he expected to be producing thousands of papers per week as soon as more users joined.
