Re: Archiving old magazines on website

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Charles Richmond wrote:

>Michael Hunter wrote:

<snip>

>> Anyway, the point being that there is so much information packed into
>> those magazines that you often cannot absorb it all at once.  I've
>> reread them many times over the last 10 to 15 years, and still find
>> new things that I must have missed the last time.
>> 
>I agree. I have a collection of old Compute!, Compute Gazette,
>BYTE, Creative Computing, Computer Language, Dr. Dobb's, and
>others...and often dig for articles containing certain info.
>ISTM that the respective companies dropped the ball when
>they failed to offer the collection on CD-ROM.

I sympathize with your desire to have the collection in a compact,
usable form.  Full text form (in addition to the scans) would be
most useful, since it could be indexed and searched.

But you are overestimating the market size if you think that this
would be a profitable exercise for a publishing house.  It would
be a miracle to sell even a thousand copies, and even at a price
of, say, $60, this would not pay for even one capable, health-insured
employee for six months (including overhead).  Therefore it is not
worth even considering.

The only way it _could_ become interesting is if a "re-publishing"
house were created, and specialized labor-saving scanners and
OCR technology were employed to create archives of _many_
older publications--I'm thinking of hundreds here--so that the
costs could be leveraged across a large number of niche markets,
to get the annual sales up into the millions of dollars.

Think about "Field & Stream", "Good Housekeeping", "Radio-
Electronics", "QST", and a hundred more and you get the idea
of an enterprise that has the potential to be economically viable.

Very few publications have a readership so devoted and a history
so rich that self-republishing makes much sense.  A couple
of years ago, National Geographic republished a CD-ROM
archive of their entire history, in both searcheable and graphic
form.  Many people bought the 31-disc set for about $100,
I'm sure, but how financially successful it was, I don't know.

My guess is that they had decided to create the archive anyway,
and offering it to the public was a cost-defraying afterthought.
(Of course, it saves a _lot_ of attic space!  ;-)  And if it were put
on DVD, you could hold the entire archive in one hand!  The
only downside is the loss of the beautiful poster maps (though
their scans remain).  I suppose in the future, when large format
printers are ubiquitous, one could always print them out, but
by that time, we may have evolved beyond our affection for
paper, as we have ended our love affair with cuneiform tablets.  ;-)

Of course, third-part republishing could only be profitable if the
original publishers were willing to take nothing or a very small
percentage of the gross in exchange for the re-publishing rights,
and that may be the real sticking point.

-michael

Check out amazing quality sound for 8-bit Apples on my
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/