Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Rolling Stone soon to be Archived

The magazine not the band, what a difference an 's' makes. Bondidigital, who have given us The New Yorker on DVD, and on memory stick, are now going to produce 40 years of Rolling Stone magazine in their proprietary digital magazine format.

The complete archive of The New Yorker is stunning value for $29.95 -- that is for 4,000 issues, 80 odd years, but think of all the cartoons. Mind you the hard drive or memory stick at $199 is not such a snip. We wonder why the publishers do not use the web to deliver this archival service. Each week another issue is added to the back issue pile. Juggling 8 DVD's to search the intermittently updated archive of a single magazine is redolent of the clunky, pre-web, technology of microfilm and microform. The price is very good, but the magazine would surely get more value and users would get much more usage if the archival service was bundled in with a current subscription, this is the model chosen by Harpers. Gaining access to a complete archive of The New Yorker would be a totally compelling reason for having a current subscription.

Bondidigital have done all the hard work of scanning, annotating and organizing the back issues, Exact Editions can provide them with a very slick and affordable ramp to web delivery. Invitation herewith extended.

I like this reviewer's comment on the DVD collection:

"...the most visceral pleasure in these discs comes from the advertising. It is so interesting that you can be forgiven for confusing the real relation between advertising and edtiorial content, for supposing that ocean of warm, gray ink existed just to support those astonishing ads. Who remembered that Exxon made an 'intelligent typewriter?'" The New York Times OPINION, Sunday, November 6, 2005. Cited here.

How true. Advertisements have a lot more entertainment and reader value in them than editors or business managers sometimes realise.

Thanks to Personanondata, where I found the Rolling Stone announcement.

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