Model Magazine Index - a proposal

The

I notice in this month's edition of Trains Magazine (also Kalbach) they you can now buy a disk containing every issue there has been. Maybe we should push them to do the same for MR? David in the UK

When I first read here that they had removed their index, that was the first thing I thought of. I think they may have removed it so they could sell their full set of magazines on a DVD or set of DVDs. The index itself may have turned into a marketing plan.

-- Ray

On 11/27/2010 12:07 PM David Pennington spake thus:

I disagree; why should we have to *pay* for such information? They already make money on back issue sales, which is one result of having a back-issue listing.

(Unless I misunderstood you and you mean push them to make the information available for free.)

It's not a listing of contents. It's the whole magazine. Every one.

-- Ray

On 11/27/2010 1:27 PM Ray Haddad spake thus:

Aha; that's different. Anyone know anything about this? How good are the scans? Since older issues were probably not available in electronic format, I'm guessing they had to be scanned into PDFs or whatever.

Other magazines that have digitized pre-ebook type formats all use

600dpi minimum with auto vertical aligning OCR. An example is Scientific Ameican's DVDs for science projects. than 1000 articles on the DVD. All that for $62.00AU plus postage.

-- Ray

I've got N Scale magazine from 1989 through 1994 on cd and it is good. Not "perfect", but at 200% of the original it is still as good or better than a newspaper. At 100% you can see dots on Some images and Some fonts have issues but are still very legible. I'm assuming they scanned direct to PDF for at least the 1989 issues.

I have some digital issues of a few newer magazines - 'Coral' and 'Orion - and I like them as much as the print editions. I had 2010 of both on download or online. Only difference is some of the extra features online. An excellent example of an ALL digital magazine is 'Model Railroad Hobbyist' -

NO print edition (unless you do your own) and so far it's free. Highly Recommended!!

Kalmbach is going to restore the index. Many have emailed them.

r