While I was home for Memorial Day, my wife once again brought up the subject of just how much room my train magazines occupy (in reality, only 2 plastic tubs) and she asked if I could scan the magazine articles onto computer files. I told her it was possible, but would be very time consuming.
But with that came an idea. Whynot give subscribers the option to take the magazine in traditional paper format or on CD (even mini CD). Sure would save lots of room and a simple hyperlink index could be made to quicly search and get to articles.
Of course as I’m typing this, I just woke up, I’m thinking this has been discussed on the forum before. The main debate being whether MR (or any other magazine for that matter) produces its magazine digitally or analog.
It has been discussed before. I think the real problem is money - can they sell enough to recoup the investment? To be truely useful it should be loadable on your harddrive and searchable across the years - i.e. more than just scanned images. Keep in mind that Kalmbach does from time to time reprint as a book, collections of past articles; so the best of MR so to speak has been available in a condensed form.
That is one subject that has been discussed on these forums for a few years now. Kalmbach has made it clear that the magazine stays as we know it now.
Maybe in 10 to 20 years the paper dinosaur will become extinct and we can finally enjoy the older issues without the bloat or mold.
Personally I consigned about 200 pounds worth of old rotting magazines to the trash after snipping out about 500 individual articles to be scanned into digital form later on. I only keep the last two years worth of issues on hand and it has made for a much happier home with the saved space that is better used in other ways.
It was interesting when I realized reading the articles in this month’s newly delivered magazine that I already am aware of the new product announcements via the internet with walthers, atheran etc and that there was nothing really new in the MR’s magazine related to new products. That was my position, the speed of the information is outstripping the obselete magazine process.
However there is always a joy to be reading a magazine.
The last time we discussed this we were beginning to collaberate as a community with everyone chipping in thier own scanning and Kalmbach decided that will stop because one of the reasons is the laws as they stand today with copyright, permissions etc…
Kalmbach has be quite good at re-cycling the “how-to” type materials in books, and download articles on the web. I would expect this web site to be the main source in the future. Clearly they are trying hard to see if we are willing to pay for web based materials such as the Information Station video PDF’s. In reality the CD is virtually obsolete now and I would not expect the DVD disk to last too far into the 21st century. If I were a publisher looking for the future of publishing these are not media that I would choose.
Amen to that. We’ve had the technology to put books on disk for a decade or more now, and when laptops first came along, many pundits predicted the demise of the book, to be replaced with laptop-like devices and disks. It just didn’t happen.
I don’t want to take a laptop on vacation so I can read train mags, or the latest Dirk Pitt novel. (Yeah, I’m a big Clive Cussler fan.) I don’t want to hide in the dark so I can read an LCD screen, or worry about whether I have enough battery left to read another chapter. And I don’t want some officious flight attendant telling me I can’t read until we reach 10 thousand feet. Foo to all of that - give me a bunch of paper stapled together any day.
Pull out a really old magazine, or, if you’ve got one, an old videotape you recorded back when you got your first VCR. (1979 for me, but the old tapes haven’t survived.) It’s not the programs or articles you’ll spend your time on, it’s the ads. Surprisingly, those are the true icons of popular culture. So, when you scan in those old magazines, don’t clip out all of the ads. Scan them along with the articles. That way, you’ll really be preserving the document.
Speaking of the tapes, the VCR is finished in our home. We have about 20 or so Movies that are beginning to rot. Those will be “Backed up” onto DVD before the year is out… and the tapes thrown away. With the growing participation of our Satellite provider in movies with our level of service we may just throw the tapes away and not bother making the backups.
I did purchase one PDF as an experiment recently and found it to be ok but consider the cost of the magazine back in the 50’s plus cost of living etc… I wont be buying too many more of those. I have been diligent in buying the recent special issues as they have new content and those I will keep as a sort of a library.
Maybe those special issues are not so special anymore, just a new way of generating quality content without having to meet a monthly schedule.
Ill stop here, Im too tempted to drain my coffee pot digging up all the things I already have said in postings related to this topic.
Flashdrives are making CDs obsolete already, be they in an iPod or cellphone or whatever. I think the CD and DVD will go the way of the floppy disk soon, except maybe for archival storage.
And although I also expect that people will one day download all their media into a universal device like some of the current cellphones, it will be very hard to replace the tactile glossiness of a high quality paper magazine. So don’t stop modeling those papermills - they’ll be around for awhile.
I suspect that you are right. Still, you gotta admit that there is nothing that beats hunkering on the couch or on your favourite Lazy Boy and having a good read when everyone else has gone to bed. Sitting at the computer, or squinting at an iPod would not compare favourably for me.
Paper is great for reading around the house, etc., but lousy for archiving.
I sarted clipping and scanning about 3 years ago - eliminated a pile of about 5 or 6 years of MR’s, and 15 years of drumming magazines. I have all the articles I “couldn’t live without” nicely archived on my computer. They are stored as jpegs, in directories labeled by author or layout name for layout features, and subject for any how-to articles. I save very few of the how-to’s, as that information could often be found again in other places, etc.
This is way more convenient than looking them up in printed magazines, storing them on the shelves, etc.
Some people will say it’s crazy to get rid of the old issues, that you could be throwing away good information. Personally, I’d be afraid to see what these people’s houses looked like if they save everything that they “might need one day”. Yikes!
Regarding DVD vs. newer forms of storage - it doesn’t really matter what the medium is, as long as the files are stored in an intelligent way digitally, it could be upgraded to any other medium later. PDF’s, for example, don’t care whether they’re stored on a CD, DVD, flash drive, hard drive, floppy drive… etc.
I don’t know…I still like to read MR,Trains,Classic Trains and Railfan track side between trains while sipping a cup of coffee.[:D][tup] Yes,one could do that with a laptop computer but,IMHO,it just wouldn’t be the same.
I should add I still love reading magazines - and probably prefer it over getting them digitally. So now I just read them, knowing I’ll clip out one article for scanning, etc. It seems to be a reasonable system.
One thing to keep control over is only scanning articles you really, really want to keep - otherwise it would be a big hassle.
I aggree. I wish I could have both. It would be nice to add an extra $ to my subscription if I could get the whole year on DVD/CD at the end of the year. I love the mags but for quick access the digital format would be great. We know they have everything in digital format prior to printing, so you would think this wouldn’t be to great a burden.
And one step further, they could hire a kid during the summer to scan in back issues and sell the issues on DVD/CD/etc. I would love that and the cost would be low. It would probably cost more to scan to digital format in the labor side than in the production.
Heck, let me download the back issues and I’ll burn my own copy, even would save them that much more.
There are a couple of reasons I keep my old magazines rather than scan or pitch.
First, as I look through my older issues (from the early to mid '60s) I remeber the joy and excitement of finding out that other people enjoy trains also. As I move farther along the time spectrum I remember life events occurring that correspond with the years. Makes for a wonderful trip down memory lane.
The other reason is that as my taste change and my skill level improves, I search out the old magazines for how to articles, drawings for structures, etc., that i was not interested in when I was younger.
As far as lugging them around, I will probably be in this house til I die (barring a winning lottery ticket, which I have a much better chance of winning if I would actually buy one of the darn things, but I digress). Disposal of them won’t be my problem.
Also, as has been mentioned, simply holding and reading them provide a satisfaction not provided by a computer.
Desktop publishing was invented in the mid 1980s, and really came into its own in the mid 1990s with the introduction of Quark Express. Quark’s debut is when most professional publishers made the switch to digital document assembly for publication. I recall MR went through a major look-and-feel redesign in the late 1990s … my guess would be that’s when MR went whole hog into producing the magazine on computer.
If this guess is correct, then that means as far as archived versions of the magazine in digital form, there’s less than 10 years of this 70+ year publication currently in digital form.
However, MR has been going back and scanning select articles for inclusion into their Information Station PDF series. If you don’t have a large back issue collection, or if you just want a great collection of articles all on one topic, then the Information Station series is great – and it’s digital!
If you google the subject of online or digital magazines (magazine distributed electronically) you can see this is the wave of the future, to be sure. In fact, the European publishers especially seem to be embracing the digital trend even more than the US and Canada.
Visionary experts are saying the switch is going to happen within the next decade. As the internet continues to gain ground, digital media is going to become the population’s number one choice for information, and the printed hardcopy page is going to become the supplement. Today it’s just the reverse … digital media is seen as the supplement to actual printed publications.
Over against all this is a recent survey done by Deloitte Touche. They found that across all age groups – both young and old alike – over 70% still prefer reading the printed page to reading content online.
So who do you believe? It does appear the printed page is going to remain with us for the forseeable future, although digital would be a nice option.
I’m glad we’ll be keeping the mags for a while. Although for quick reference I like it on computer, I enjoy reading printed mags more, and they tend to keep my attention better. But like several people above, I have devoted a lot of space to the storage of back issues.
I have been scanning my MR’s in the computer nd saving them as pdf’s like they sell. If you have the right programs you can make a hyperlink to go to the articles you want etc.
I dont think it would be to hard for kalmbach to make pdf versions of any of their magazines. They produce them on a computer so all they have to do is change the format and save it.
As for the idea you cant take you to the special reading room (throne room) why not print it up? or atleast the article you might be interested in.
Also they flash drive wont take over DVD’s for a longtime cant store enough information for larger movie files, files can only be compressed so far till it looks like well junk. Also I think technology will be slowing down smaller chips means tey run hotter and need to be cooled. So sooner or later they are going to stop making smaller processors. Look at Intel chips they are small and run hotter than the AMD chips which in my opinion faster but run cooler than the Intel chip. And with flash drives etc constantly running with no air source can cause damage.
Let’s say they dont need to hire a kid, I probably will donate the computer time and several hours a week to this task for free because I would like to see this project achieve a “Critical mass” needed to move forward. If … 200 members checked off a master list of month/year issues scanned eventually all will have the copies in digital form without too much expense. I think the only trouble would be to convert all the Jpegs into PDF’s and having someone to oversee the Community effort.
But again I think Kalmbach will resist this because all of the authors, all of the content creators etc are protected by US law as it stands because we are only allowed to copy for personal use, not to make the material accessible to anyone with a computer and a internet connection (Whatever form that might take… Ipod, celluar phone, laptop at 40,000 feet … etc)
Milwhiawatha Im already approaching the limits of aircooling, my Antec Nine Hundred case is about as good as I can get. Flash drives dont have moving parts and will not fail like regular hard drives. We are already exploring Magnetic RAM, Optical memory and beyond. It’s quite possible someday al
While hiring some kid to scan magazines all summer sounds clever, I wouldn’t pay money to get back issue scans that looked like they were done by some kid. Even worse is the idea to split the scanning up between all of us. You’ll get scan quality all over the map.
For a professional publisher, the look of your publication is paramount, and slapping together some scans is out of the question. It has to be done right, by paid professionals, or forget it.
If the cost is prohibitive then so be it. But less-than-the-best-possible-scans isn’t an option. It’s like being a body shop guy and saying maybe you could get some college kids to come in and repaint all your friends and relatives’ cars for cheap. Not gonna happen …