I know this topic has been discussed before, but I am sure many of you noticed that Kalmbach just released “70 Years of Trains Magazine on DVD”. So the inevitable question is: When will Kalmbach release “70 Years of Model Railroader Magazine on DVD”? Is this in the works?
Even though I now belong to a club that has all the back issues of Model Railroader Magazine neatly bound , I would definately purchase Model Railroader Magazine on DVD just for the convenience of having it handy and so I could finally dump my physical copies.
So has anyone heard anything about this being a possiblity?
Rather more than a hint. When it was discontinued the administrator explained that it had been an independently-developed ‘labor of love’ by an individual, was non-standard in format and had some very serious security issues. Since the fix would have been both expensive and time-consuming, the index was dropped.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t we told the last time someone started a thread asking about this that it would be ‘impossible’ and they’d have to charge more money than people would be willing to pay?
Yet here it is, for Trains magazine, at a very fair price. Maybe they were already working on it and didn’t want to let the cat out of the bag yet?
I would definitely buy this if it became available at a reasonable price. I think the day is coming when most/all magazines and newspapers will issued exclusively through electronic media. If and when this DVD becomes available, it will be a real dilemma for me. The packrat in me would not want to pitch the printed issues I have stored going back to the late 1970s. It’s kind of like the story of the government employee who asked his boss if they could free up some file cabinet space by throwing out lots of out of date documents. His boss thought about and then told him, “OK, but make copies of everything first”.
Have you noticed tje price for that DVD? It’s $149.95 plus the cost of shipping and I thik its overpriced. I think they would sell twice the number at $99.99 than they’ll sell at $149.99 because many who might buy at the lower price won’t even consider it at any price over $100. I, for 1, wouldn’t and I am sure ther are many who feel the way I do about this.
Now using this as an example, I think any such collection of MR would require several DVDs and once you exceed one of these searching for an particular article using some sort of workable indexing system is going to be so complicated that thjis collection would have to be sold at $999.95 to make it even worthwhile using the pricing scheme I think Kalmbach uses. And I welcome Kalmbach or one of its representatives can correct me if I am wrong.
S would it really be worth it for most of us to have that?
Overpriced? It’s $2/year! I don’t think even the first year a subscription was that cheap. (talking Trains here, in 1940 - actually it was called Trains and Travel at first). That’s quite reasonable for 70 years worth of content
I also wonder about the pricing of an MR set of DVDs. MR over the years has been a lot bigger, by page count, than Trains ever was. So, both the effort to create such a set and the number of DVDs required I would think is going to be significantly larger. Thus, it’s likely to be a much more expensive affair compared with Trains at $150, unless the folks at Kalmbach are feeling ex