Magazine back issues on DVD

In 1997 National Geographic published an archive of all its back issues on CD-ROM. Some writers and photographers sued National Geographic, claiming the magazine didn't have the right to do that. This scared other magazine publishers from selling digital versions of their back issues.

But in June, two US Appeals Courts ruled that National Geographic did have the right to sell back issues on CD-ROM. The said digital archives were like library microfiches, which freelancers never got paid for either. (More about this here.)

I'm not going to argue for or against the courts' decision. I'm just glad that I'll be able to start buying complete back runs of famous magazines. I already have the complete run of Mad, and am looking forward to getting the the complete run of National Lampoon (all 246 original magazines from 1970 through 1998), and the complete runs of Silver Age Marvel comic books.

In a couple of days, Bondi Digital Publishing (which published the complete run of The New Yorker as a DVD set and as portable hard drive) will release a DVD of all the 1950s issues of Playboy and all 40 years of The Rolling Stone.

Other magazine and comic back issues I'm hoping will soon be offered on DVD: Scientific American, Popular Science, Harvey Kurtzan's Trump/Help/Humbug, Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Anonymous

>> Famous Monsters of Filmland

I second that motion!

Also Castle of Frankenstein, The Monster Times, Filmfax, Psychotronic and Cinefantastique.

Hmm.. do I detect a theme here? ;)
jubjub

greetings:
a complete run of Mad in proprietary format.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000HKMQ64/boingboing/

what a waste!

prelinger, above, has the right idea. If your going to achive something use standard based formats.

Please consider documentation formats when you produce an achive.

btw: if you need a specific operating system to view documents you’ll soon find you are limiting your market.

thanks

re-v
Kevin Andrew Murphy

O “Jewels” of the annoyingly fake pseudonym and chirpy questions:

1. If these writers don’t want their works published, why do they write them?

Answer: Because we also want to be credited and paid.

2. And why do they think they still own them after they have sold them?

Answer: Because our contracts and copyright law says that we own them. My first very first contract ever stipulated “first North American serial rights” which means printing in a North American magazine the first time. The author then gets to sell reprint rights. There was no mention of being pressed on little plastic disks for compilations and those subsequently sold, and in any case, I would be entitled by contract to author’s copies of those as well. Which I never received.

3. And if they only want to rent them, why don’t they get contracts that say so?

Answer: Our contracts often do say so. Explicitly. In words even idiots should understand. Unfortunately greedy megacorporations are in the habit of acquiring old publishers and squeezing as much cash as they can from them and can’t be bothered to do things like review old contracts or even keep them on file properly. It’s much cheaper to hire a lawyer to yell “Ha ha ha — we own it all!” and poke and prod at the system until they find a judge who’ll see it their way.
Anonymous

I was somewhat disappointed with the Mother Earth News CD archive. It contains only the articles. I would like to have seen the entire magazine, ads and all (still searchable).
klg19

Why are they doing these on DVD-ROM only? What’s wrong with making a web-based subscription version for institutions? I’m a librarian at a very large university, and acquiring these for a one-user-at-a-time model is just CRAZY.
Anonymous

BTW, Popular Science pre-1963 is in public domain. We’re looking for a set to digitize and make available online for free (our set is incomplete).

Anyone got one? The process is nondestructive.

Rick Prelinger
acquisitions@prelingerlibrary.org
http://www.prelingerlibrary.org
Richard Wymarc

Add to the wish list: Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, and Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Anonymous

Spy, please.
lloyd alter

oy, you have no idea how powerful that image from national lampoon is. Seth Godin noted that it has been voted one of the ten best magazine covers ever; I used it on a post about car energy efficiency standards

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/07/no_increase_in.php

and did I get it.
Scalzi

all 40 years of The Rolling Stone.

THE Rolling Stone? Rolling Stone don’t need no stinkin’ indefinite articles!
deadfrog

As someone who spent much of his early days on eBay trying to gather up a (still imcomplete) Lampoon collection from sellers, this is great news.

The search functions were pretty good on the Mad DVD, so it’ll be nice for when I’m telling a friend about a legendary Michael O’Donoghue article that’s in a issue, but I don’t remember which one. (Although the Mad DVDs weren’t searchable by author… grrr.)
Anonymous

Note that one of the best magazine deals available today is Harper’s, which, if you subscribe, gives you full access to its entire archives on the web, dating back to 1951!
Kevin Andrew Murphy

Excepting of course that library microfiche isn’t/wasn’t affordable/available to the general public, and libraries also generally have full bound collections of the periodicals.

The case was settled previously with Tasini vs. The New York Times. Hardly surprising that they’ve now come up with a new way to not pay authors but make money while doing it.
Anonymous

Hopefully, digital collections of Trouser Press and The Monster Times aren’t too far behind.
pete_darby

More CD-rom magazine goodness: http://www.forteantimes.com/front_website/cdrom/

Pretty much the whole of the Fortean Times, IIRC, Searchable, indexed PDF’s.

http://www.amazon.com/Victor-Technologies-2021139-Magazine-Archive/dp/B00002EIWS

Dragon Magazine, up to about five years ago.
Adam Stanhope

OC & Stiggs!
adm

The big problem with many of these digital collections is that the full text is not searchable. I have the National Geographic collection, and it is only indexed by keyword and (I think) the article title. I understand the technical/economic reasons for this, but I hope that as the technology become cheaper and faster, more publishers will release their stuff with a full-text index. (That said, I also have the Spider-Man collection, but I can live without full text search on that, I think.)

I would like to see Harper’s (which dates to the 1850s or so) release all their stuff, and Life magazine, what with all the great photos.
License Farm

Seconded on Cracked, Starlog (and sister publication Fangoria) and Omni, Om. One correction, though: Kathy Keeton wasn’t Bob Guccione’s daughter, nor was she a tramp; she was his wife. The great irony is that she was such a health nut, and launched Omni‘s failed spinoff Longevity; within a few years, she died, only in her 50′s.

I was a huge fan of Omni, from the time I discovered it in 1987, precisely the midpoint of its run, until it folded in 1995. I do have a number of earlier issues, including the first and a couple others from its first year, but I still don’t know what you mean by it becoming Penthouse Jr., Om. As far as I could tell, it always was classy, albeit a touch lame in its latter days.

Other compilations I’d love, if only for the sake of nostalgia:

* Sesame Street (my uncle did a lot of photography for them in the early days)

* 3-2-1 Contact (ditto)

* Weekly Reader

* Dynamite and Hot Dog

* AXcess (it straddled between Mondo 2000 and Wired)

* Heavy Metal

* The Weekly World News

* The Comics Journal (naturally, given recent developments, they’d have to excise interviews with Harlan Ellison)

* The Onion

I’m sure more will come to me, but that’s a healthy sampling for now.
nol

i just wanted to second the motion for re-releasing Harvey Kurtzan’s Trump/Help/Humbug magazines … i’ve been hoping to read those now for about 20 years, without any real luck other than the stray copy here and there.
jeaguilar

Kevin, my (meek) understanding of Tasini is of a ruling in favor of authors by finding that a print article and a Lexis/Nexis version of the article were different things from a copyright standpoint. Do the recent re-rulings in the National Geographic cases change that? Or, do the publishers only have the right to re-publish in digital form provided that the format (layout, etc…) is preserved?
Mark Simonson

Wow, I never expected this to happen because of all the legal and copyright issues associated with the magazine. I run Mark’s Very Large National Lampoon Site (www.marksverylarge.com) and usually hear about these thing ahead of time from insiders hoping for a little free publicity, but this is a big surprise to me. I think it’s very good news. (Nothing beats reading the real thing, though, what with all the clever printing tricks and different paper stocks they used for the sake of a joke.)
Martin

I believe there was a separate ruling for the National Geographic case stating that while Tasini applied individual articles or pictures or whatnot, that it was proper for The New Yorker to consider an entire issue or a series of issues their creation. I also think that not having the full text searchable was part of that ruling. So you might as well get used to not having full text. But in any case, that’s the reason they are obliged to present a run of issues as a run of issues, they would not be able to sell just the Norman Mailer articles or something.

Personally, I think this is a good ruling, and as a result we get the much-criticized Complete New Yorker, which is far from perfect but I’d rather look at imperfect original page layouts than ASCII anyway.

We cover the Complete New Yorker extensively at Emdashes.com — by all means come visit us! http://emdashes.com/squib-report/
Sorry for the plug, but it is right up our alley.
Anonymous

Fck ll th wrtrs, phtgrphrs, dsgnrs nd rtsts, nd jst rls th <>SPY nd <>Sssy DVDs lrdy!
Mark Frauenfelder

# 7: “Nothing beats reading the real thing, though, what with all the clever printing tricks and different paper stocks they used for the sake of a joke.”

I agree, Mark. I really liked NatLamp’s “Miracle Monopoly Cheating Kit,” which contained Chance cards and money in very large denominations.
stuart kaufman

I’d love to see Spy magazine.
Jewels Vern

If these writers don’t want their works published, why do they write them? And why do they think they still own them after they have sold them? And if they only want to rent them, why don’t they get contracts that say so?
Graham

Grrr…Amazon don’t deliver software abroad.
adm

Jewels, I don’t think cd-roms existed back when your grandparents were saving stacks of national geographics in their attic. The contract with the writers probably covered distribution via electric car and video phone, but the web and optical discs slipped through a loophole, apparently.
Anonymous

Don’t forget Mother Earth News and, if you’re really geeky, the first ten years of the International Human Powered Vehicles Association’s digest.
OM

…My wish list for DVD magazine collections:

1) Cracked. Sylvester P. Smythe beat the frack out of Alfred E. Neumann any day of the week!

2) Cinefex. Nuff Said!

3) Starlog. Especially the first 8-9 years, when the magazine was still worth a shit.

4) Look. The competitor to Life had its share of classic photography that needs to be shared with later generations.

5) Omni. Or, at least, the first 5 years or so, before Guccionni’s ~~tramp~~ daughter tried to turn it into Penthouse Jr.

6) Rolling Stone. Again, ‘Nuff Said!

7) Famous Monsters of Filmland. Forry would just wet his pants over a full set of his classics on DVD!

8) Jane’s for both Aircraft and Ships, from the first edition to the last. An excellent way to chart the evolution of global warfare capabilities and the intelligence that helped dig up what the frack they were all about.

9) By that same token AvLeak. No explanation necessary.

10) Finally, Smithsonian and SASM. The “Poor Man’s NatGeo”, but still worth the DVD compilations!

…Of course, the real question is whether or not these can be released without the use of bullshit proprietary readers that don’t allow for ease of use. That was what was crippled the NatGeo set for me. Just give it to us in hi-rez PDFs and be done with it!
Anonymous

Mother Earth News has been doing this for a couple of years. Great to pick up the old down home simpler issues, when the focus was how to do it yourself rather than which “green” product to buy.