Complete New Yorker Magazine on a USB hard drive (DRM crippled)

"Levenger has all 80 years of The New Yorker on a USB hard drive on sale for $150!"

Now all 4,164 issues and 500,000+ pages of The New Yorker, from its February 21, 1925 debut to April 2006, are available to Levenger customers on one pocket-sized, USB-powered portable hard drive that's about the size of a PDA. You can take this treasury wherever you take your laptop or use your desktop PC or Mac. Enjoy the fastest, easiest access there is to the complete archives of America's grande dame of literary magazines.

Find virtually anything you're looking for, in any issue, thanks to an indexing system that's simple but thorough. Browse by cover, by author or department, year or week.

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Reader comments:

Carol says:

It might be worth adding a footnote that with this product, you are
working with a complete DRM'd thing. You cannot even select a
sentence or two to quote in a document. (I personally own the 6 DVD
set issued prior to the hard drive offering.) So, it's high-quality
page images, including the ads. But certain aspects are indeed
disappointing.

In addition, this is not full-text indexed, rather the index
reproduces the manual one used at New Yorker offices.

Mister Jalopy says:

Having spent a chunk of my life on writing about the Complete New Yorker [here and here], I keep trying to not get sucked back into this hole. Though I didn't crack it in the Mr. Kracman-style of completely disabling the Macrovision, I was able to get it working on a hard drive with some minor SQL changes.

To be fair to the New Yorker, it is true you can not do a full text search or clip a sentence, but that really has nothing to do with DRM. The Complete New Yorker is image scans only – it was not OCR'd and, as such, there is no text to clip or search. Given the scope of the project, I can't say I blame them.

The three primary nasty bits to the DVD Complete New Yorker were:

1) Couldn't load to a HD.

Ed Klaris, general counsel and Complete New Yorker project manager, stated in a radio interview that loading onto a hard drive was not necessary. That there was more than enough information on one DVD to satisfy the consumer. That swapping was not arduous.

Seems Ed changed his mind on this one. Great!

2) Spyware End User License Agreement

The EULA said they could record what articles you read, in what order, how long on each page, etc. Then, they reserved the right to tie this data to your name/address/phone number and sell it to third parties.

In a New York Times article that quoted Ed Klaris and myself, Ed stated that the spyware language was included in the EULA by accident.

3) Macrovision

Though the EULA states you are allowed to make a back-up copy, the DVD's are protected with Macrovision.

Although I should know better, I really want the Complete New Yorker. I returned the DVDs, but I just ordered the Levenger HD version.

If the EULA is still insidious as fuck, I will return it. Ed said it was a mistake, so, hopefully, it is sorted at this point.

What about Macrovision? What if it is still copy protected? Well, what can I say? That will suck. But it will suck no worse than the protected movies that I buy.