I have a copy of every magazine I've had work published it. Over the years, this means I've amassed a huge pile.
An office clearout last week saw this pile bundled up in plastic and moved to storage. It's pretty much cleared me out apart from the current years BRM and Garden Rail plus a folder of miscellaneous publications.
Nowadays, the need to keep old paper mags is much less. I have access to electronic versions of BR mand GR through Exact Editions. Thanks to the excellent search engine on this system, I can find anything I need to refer too and bring it up to read. If I simply want to know which edition of a mag I've written, the search on this blog is there to help - that's the main reason I post every time I'm in print.
Despite this, I still leaf through old mag every so often, Last week I wanted to check when a couple of models had hit the GR news and it was simpler to flick through the paper copies.
All this is a far cry from my days running websites. I have copies of the very first ones I ran on CD, but later Content Management Systems didn't allow me to save work in a recoverable form. All that is now long gone unless I look at the Wayback Machine and even this isn't that complete.
I wonder how those simply plonking their content on-line will feel when the only record is their memories?
4 comments:
Not really a fan of "e-Magazines". When you cease a subscription, you lose all access and there is limited facility to download articles.
Some European magazines have the ability to buy previous years on DVD. I have recently done this with a couple of magazines, Eisenbahm Journal and MIBA. EJ sell their's for 15 Euros a year or for 59 Euros every year from 1975-2018. MIBA are similar but their 15 Euros include some 4 Special issues per year and for 79 Euros will buy every issue from 1948-2018. Files are all PDFs so it is easy to copy them to your hard disk and have instant access.
Wish some of the British mags would do similar.
Brian G
I keep wondering if I should print out every blog post that I've written, just in case Blogger goes amok and everything is lost. Its not for vanity though, I do tend to refer back to older posts to see how I did certain jobs.
Keeping access to the issues after you cancel a sub depends on the system. Pocketmag allows you to cancel at any point and retain access to those you've paid for.
For me, there's another question regarding e-subscriptions - how do I ensure that I can read all the editions I've paid for offline (like when travelling), on any of several different computers (Windows PC / laptop, and Android tablet / smartphone) I might be using at the time.
With some e-magazines, such as Model Railroad Hobbyist, this is easy - they're paid for by advertising and distributed as PDF files.
Meanwhile, this might get more complicated with UK based magazines with a more conventional, "reader pays", business model there might be internal resistance to distributing editions as PDFs - likely driven by a need to avoid pirated copies being passed between readers on the sly.
I'm not sure that a perfect distribution model even exists - never mind having been accepted by readers as well as publishers.
I guess it might be a while (if ever) before this gets answered in full.
In the meantime, I guess that a lot of people like me will continue to make our own decisions on this, to some extent basad on our existing preferences.
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