http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200204/corson

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/186007/gray

It’s one example of an industry catering to early adopting paying customers (primarily libraries and newspapers in this case) and inadvertently screwing the Commons in the process. There’s all that good New York Times content that’s probably not covered by copyright anymore too (which is how Cornell got away with digitizing the older Atlantic content in the first place).

Two classic Atlantic articles by Tracy Kidder: Flying Upside Down and The Ultimate Toy, both of them from The Soul of a New Machine (1981), still the best case study (and, come to think of it, introductory text book) on leading techies I have ever read.

Lastly, of course, Vannevar Bush’ classic proto-web article As We May Think. Published in 1945, at a time when computers were measured in square meters and calculations per second…..

The fantastic Atlantic Monthly magazine has dropped its paywall effective today, switching its archives (which stretch all the way back to 1857!) to an ad-supported model. First the New York Times, then the Atlantic…

I dunno. I’ve run into this meme before (maybe even here!) that the NYTimes was going free online, but if you try a search for NYTimes articles pre-1980, they still want $3.95 per article.

Which, of course, is their right (it’s their site), but I’m not sure they quite deserve the praise they seem to have been getting.

Worth checking out in its own right.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/186604/longfellow

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/185804/autocrat-breakfast-table

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/185906/holmes

Am I missing something? Or is the free stuff only a selected portion of the Atlantic collection? If so, your headline should perhaps read “The Atlantic Monthly sets (a portion of) its archive free.”

LOLITA. “It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/195809/lolita-review

ON THE ROAD. “The book is most readable. It disappoints because it constantly promises a revelation or a conclusion of real importance and general applicability, and cannot deliver any such conclusion because Dean is more convincing as an eccentric than as a representative of any segment of humanity.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/57oct/pla.htm

SCARLET LETTER. “Discreet readers will not construe me too literally when I venture the opinion that the day of dead or galvanized fiction is coming to an end. Let the circulating libraries have no misgivings; nothing is more certain than that, for many a day and year to come, their shelves will groan, as of yore, with admirable examples of the class alluded to. Moreover, Shakespeare lived a long while ago, and Homer and Moses longer yet; so that it might seem as if the threatened danger were safely astern of us, not to mention that, just at present, there seems to be a more than ordinary quantity of cunningly wrought waxen images on hand. As against those arguments and indications, it can only be urged that the progress of the human race probably implies much more than electricity and steering-balloons would prepare us for; and that the true conquest of matter by mind, being a religious rather than a scientific transaction is likely to be felt, obscurely and vaguely, long before it can be definitely comprehended and acknowledged.” [Where do I get me one of those steering-ballons?]

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/188604/scarlet-letter