The Magazine Rack of Babel

A nice celebration/prediction of what omnipresent Adobe technology has done/is doing for the cause of spreading and preserving old paper literature from Gary North at LewRockwell.com. He also presents an entrepreneurial suggestion:

Magazine publishers are sitting on top of gold mines. National Geographic understood this early and put all of its old issues in a boxed set of CD-ROMs. This set originally retailed for $350. I bought a set at Sam?s Club for about $180 in 2000. The publisher made millions of dollars. (The box?s photo of an Afghan teenage girl with the huge eyes was worth a fortune as a sales device. A reporter tracked her down a couple of years ago. He showed her the NG cover. That was the only photo she ever had taken. She had not seen it. I wonder if she knows about signed release forms and royalties. Probably not.)

Right wing, left wing, it doesn?t matter. A magazine publisher can now put all of the back issues on-line or in a CD-ROM. Maybe he will hire you to do this on a contract basis if you present him with a free CD-ROM of one year of issues.

With Adobe Acrobat Pro, magazine publishers now have a bonanza available. They can convert long-dead inventory into money. They can offer a CD-ROM set of a complete 60-year set of the magazine for, say, $149.95, or for only $19.95 if someone subscribes or renews his subscription for three years.

Great suggestion. And for those publications no longer blessed with active continuing owners–like, say, many of the old science fiction magazines, and fanzines from the SF, comics, and indie music worlds I dote on and desultorily accumulate/collect–fans with web access will certainly be using the power of Adobe 6.0's instant page-to-PDF function, and Google's ability to search within those PDFs, to make lots and lots of, um, enthusiasts like me very happy indeed–and encourage us all to take the effort to make each other happy. (In fact, I'm surprised there hasn't been more of this type of action already–maybe I'm missing it.) This is truly an extraordinary and well-nigh miraculous age of cultural preservation and revival, and it should only get better.