What is an Ezine?

Who knew we'd all end up having to learn so many new words and terminology and end up using it in our daily life. We're all dropping terms that weren't invented when we left high school.

• We used to go to the movies, then we watched them on Beta and VHS, now we're into home theaters and DVDs.
• Our 78s, 45s and hi-fi albums have given way to 8-tracks, cassettes and now CDs and digital players like the IPods.
• Mail used to mean handwritten letters on pretty stationary with an envelope to match; now we send Electronic mail we've shortened to the term email.
• Now while some magazines like Reader's Digest still arrive in the mailbox, others like Living at Lake Chapala are electronic magazines that are only available at our website. Electronic magazines have come to be called ezines and that's what we are.

Why don't we prepare Living at Lake Chapala as a printed magazine? There's lots of reasons, but most important to us are holding the line on your costs, getting as much information to you as we can, and having it to you as quickly as we can. The costs to print 12 monthly articles with 1,500 to 4,000 words and up to 12 photos are astronomical. In addition to doubling or tripling your current subscription fee, we'd need to have 80-100 pages of advertising each month, including those annoying perfume samples and all those cards that fall out in your lap.

We're writers — cyber journalists — and we prefer to focus on preparing accurate, up-to-date interesting and informative articles each month and leave the ad sales and collections to the other folks. You have told us you're enjoying our ezine and you like knowing it'll be there when you wake up on the first day of each month.

Some of you read the articles right there on your computer screen, others print out the articles you find most interesting to read later or to share with family members. Some of you are even putting your printed articles into binders to make your own Living at Lake Chapala books.

That's the joy of an ezine — the information is at your fingertips, the choices of how to read that information are up to you, and the savings are yours, too