Dear Friends, I, for one, am satisfied with my long-standing membership in the AOS, and I just signed up for another two years.
I'm sorry that I'm becoming a minority, but I'm convinced the magazine is every bit as good as it was 28 years ago when I first joined. I know, because I still have many of those old AOS Bulletins and look through them from time to time. What has changed dramatically is the loss of all of those famous old names of ground-breaking, experienced breeders and growers that delighted us with articles that gave us information that we'd never heard before. I consider any boredom I may have with the current content merely a product of "hearing it all before" during the past 28 years. Its true that the internet has changed everything. With a few clicks I gain access to a wealth of information never available before. But this is true of everything, not just orchids. With the advent of the internet I am no longer TOTALLY dependent on the AOS magazine to arrive at my home to get any kind of orchid information. I'm pleased that many of you have local orchid societies with respected experts who publish an excellent newsletter and website. Most of us are not that lucky. I'm not. The information in the magazine is still good, its now full of color, and it has a beautiful large format. The AOS has good people writing good articles of interest...they're just not written by the familiar old names from by-gone years. The raise in price of annual AOS membership to $60 was and is painful, no doubt. In a "Walmart Society" where we expect prices to go down, not up, its a shock, and people will vote with their checkbooks. But, however convenient the internet is to me, it still cannot replace having a hard-copy magazine in my hands to read at my convenience, archive on my shelf, and have on hand decades later. I've counted up the cost and effort of printing off website pages of interest, and the magazine remains a very good and convenient value. Please understand that I'm not saying the status quo is perfect. We should always strive to better things. And society politics is a messy business that makes nobody happy. I'm just not ready to get off this horse just because the price of the feed has gone up. Ed Merkle Merkle's Orchids 1008 Maplewood Place Nashville, Tennessee 37216 _________________________________________________________________ The MSN Entertainment Guide to Golden Globes is here. Get all the scoop. http://tv.msn.com/tv/globes2007/?icid=nctagline2 _______________________________________________ the OrchidGuide Digest (OGD) [email protected] http://orchidguide.com/mailman/listinfo/orchids_orchidguide.com
