How about starting a scanned magazines section??

[suppafly]

I just love video game magazines. I have over 200 of `em. They were scarce here in mexico but i managed to find them. For a long time i´ve been trying to find some of them scanned in the internet, but with no luck.

That made me wonder how popular a magazine section would be here on Digitpress? I´d be willing to RIP APART and scan my beloved magazines if Joe, or someone else with a lot of bandwith would agree to make them available for download indefintedly....

I have a lot of EGMS, Nintendo Powers, Gamepros, Megaplays,, etc......It sounds like a big job, but theres no hurry right?

What do you all guys think? Is this a good or bad idea? I´d be willing to scan a magazine every week (thats all the free time i can find!)

[suppafly]

Oops.....i posted this in the wrong section..

Can any mod please move it to the "Video game forum"??

Thanks! :)

[Kejoriv]

Not a bad idea at all

[portnoyd]

Unless you can secure the rights to post these magazine scans, that's a negative on this idea. I know it took DP a while to get the OK to post Collector Closet scans, which he wrote himself!

dave

[suppafly]

Well....theres an magazine-ads section right now. I dont think we have permission to post all those ads too, right?

Anyway....maybe it´d be safer to scan all the magazines that are no longer in business? Any ideas??

Thanks

[MarioAllStar2600]

AtariAge does scans of some flyers and atai magazines. Not exactly what you were looking for but hope it helps.

[digitalpress]

You really have to get permission to post anything that is magazine "content". Adverts are fine because the very nature of them is to get as many people to see them as possible. Magazine content is copyright material, however, so you need permission from the publisher before you have any real "right" to re-distribute on the web.

[suppafly]

So that basically buries my idea :(

thanks anyway

[NE146]

Here is an entire issue of Joystik (http://tinyurl.com/3txxg) I scanned :)

I plan on scanning each and every issue of Joystik in FULL eventually. The other issues were scanned a couple years ago by another person, but they are missing the pages that deal with home games :P

[YoshiM]

Oh, I would so love for there to be a place where others can electronically peruse through gaming/computer mags of the past to see how different (and amazingly similar) things were. But like it was mentioned, it's a big kettle o' worms with the copyrights even if you DO own the rights to the magazine. Wizards of the Coast (I believe) who purchased TSR, the creators of Dungeons and Dragons, released issues 1 through 250 of Dragon Magazine on CD-ROM and they got serious flack from article authors on whether or not they would get additional royalty(? or something along those lines) pay from the mag re-release.

The only way we would probably see a magazine repository would be if they charged X amount per mag in a PDF format. And ya know what, if it's mags I wanna read and the price is right I'll be right there downloading those mothers in a heart beat. Heart. Beat.

[Flack]

From a completely different viewpoint ...

On many occasions at my old website I would have both staff members and users suggest ideas. "Why don't we do this?" "You should do that." "Man your site would rule if you had this." Each time I left scrambling for the idea or section that would bring people in in droves.

Nine times out of ten, the ideas never happened. Oh, I did MY part, but the people with the suggestions never came through. "If you let me on the staff I will write a review every week Flack!" Well, 9 months later they had submitted less than five things. "If you programmed this new article in I would submit a new article once a month!" Then I would go back to coding, and when it was all done it would sit there, empty.

This isn't to sound bitter or anything. I would just say if someone came to me now and said, "hey, I'll scan in 200 magazines and we could have a magazine section!" I would say to that person, "go scan the first 100 in and then we'll talk."

[suppafly]

Well, if someone tells me to start doing that i will. Im very interested about this. But Joe already said NO.... :(

[NE146]

I have a time frame of about 1 month - 5 years to eventually scan in those Joystiks. I just do it at my leisure (it took me about a month to scan that one issue) :P

'Course it's definitely nothing "official"... i.e. not for any particular site, etc.

And the way people talk about it, I think that's about your only hope for mag scans. And that's just fan based scanning let loose on the wild interweb by posting onto usenet (usually I'd hit a.b.emulators.misc) or of course on any web space if available :D

I mean.. look at comic books and their usenet postings. They are scanned EN MASSE (http://www.guba.com/c/206/i/461/2004-07-18/21.phtml) and you can find scans of almost every comic in existance from the 40's on up to today.. and it's just all done by fans.

[Griking]

What about old magazines like Joystik and the original Electronic Games? Are the publishers of these magazines still in existance? If not then who would cause a stink if they were scanned and made public?

[suppafly]

Yeah, thas what i suggested earlier on...how about scanning magazines no longer in business? And IF someone *ever* asks us to pull the plug, we will remove them.... How about that Joe??? :D

[YoshiM]

@NE146: I can save ya the trouble, I think I got almost every scan of Joystik. Someone did this in the past and the sites disappeared (don't know if it was from copyright issues or just plain bandwidth issues) but they are available on Archive.org (I don't have the address).

[NE146]

@NE146: I can save ya the trouble, I think I got almost every scan of Joystik. Someone did this in the past and the sites disappeared (don't know if it was from copyright issues or just plain bandwidth issues) but they are available on Archive.org (I don't have the address).


The other issues were scanned a couple years ago by another person, but they are missing the pages that deal with home games

Actually if you had just clicked the link I provided, you can find those very scans you are talking about ;).. should be easy to find.

That was DLH (an IRC acquaintance) who scanned those. But like I said, he didn't scan them in full. He only scanned the pages that dealt with arcade games and left out other pages that dealt with home games (as well as letters, etc) out. Doesn't seem like much but that's a lot of missing pages!

Also, since he only dealt with arcade game sections, he did NOT scan one particular issue.. the "How to win at Home Video Games" which is why I decided to scan that one first.. i.e. the missing link :D

So yeah I'll scan them in sometime.. in FULL. But who knows when :P


What about old magazines like Joystik and the original Electronic Games? who would cause a stink if they were scanned and made public?

Probably just those who want them to increase in "value" so they can either sell them or feel good about hoarding them LOL I dunno. Fugget... scan 'em and share 'em I say! :D

But again I doubt you'd see it anytime soon on any major site like here at DP. Leave it to the obscure places ;)

[kevincure]

Just send an email to EGM, NextGen or whoever you want to scan and ask if you can throw up scans of some of their old magazines on a classic games fansite. Honestly, I can't imagine that most companies would object to content that old being put online.