# emailing ambit magazine about artificial paywalls > dear ambit magazine > hello > i'm an internets based amateur postmodern philosopher and would love to read all your back issues for artistic inspiration and literary insight > thing is i can't both because i'm totally skint - and your site currently exists as an artificial paywall to entry > example context: i'm a huge admirer of j.g. ballard and have helped interview a photographer with simon sellars; am also busy developing a new form of post-cyberpunk literature incorporating ballard's idea of "condensed novels" > i'm still surprised and greatly disappointed that awesome communities of evolutionary artistic talent and passion such as yours while keen to sell ir wares online are not actually embracing the creative potential of the internets to ir fullest > that is i think you should be making every single back issue of ambit magazine available online to everyone intelligent enough to seek you out in the first place > such a move however necessarily entails both disregarding impossibly ancient "traditional publishing models"(tm) and radically rethinking what you're really about - at least in terms of eg. newer online distribution models crowd based funding etc > as ralph steadman says - and you seem proud to admit - ambit is indeed a 'a surreptitious peek inside a private world'. yes.. just maybe not for 30 quid a year > while this sounds a minor first world problem - indeed 30 quid seems very reasonable - the underlying issue of truly free (libre) open (public) access to cultural information is vitally serious > in summary: alternative artistic resources like ambit are far too important (/sub) culturally to not fully engage with the internets - see the mighty ubuweb for (at least partial) comparison > it's my hope that you respond to this humble mail and we - for a while at least as fellow artists - open and maintain a brief dialogue / bridge concerning pricing the internets open access culture and other important related matters sincerely robert what amateur postmodern internet theorist **update patch** might as well be standing on the top of a lonely hill in the smack dead middle of online social winter while 'pissing into your own stale wind' and mumbling incoherently // republic of bob