ASCII by Jason Scott

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In Which I Tell You It’s A Good Idea To Support a Magazine-Scanning Patreon —

So, Mark Trade and I have never talked, once.

All I know about Mark is that due to his efforts, over 200 scans of magazines are up on the Archive.

headlock

These are very good scans, too. The kind of scans that a person looking to find a long-lost article, verify a hard-to-grab fact, or needs to pass along to others a great image would kill to have. 600 dots per inch, excellent contrast, clarity, and the margins cut just right.

cd-rom_today_05_aprmay_1994_0036

So, I could fill this entry with all the nice covers, but covers are kind of easy, to be frank. You put them face down on the scanner, you do a nice big image, and then touch it up a tad. The cover paper and the printing is always super-quality compared to the rest, so it’ll look good:

cd-rom_today_05_aprmay_1994_0000

But the INSIDE stuff… that’s so much harder. Magazines were often bound in a way that put the images RIGHT against the binding and not every magazine did the proper spacing and all of it is very hard to shove into a scanner and not lose some information. I have a lot of well-meaning scans in my life with a lot of information missing.

But these…. these are primo.

pcgames_01_fall_1988_0011

pcgames_01_fall_1988_0012

pcgames_01_fall_1988_0073

When I stumbled on the Patreon, he had three patrons giving him $10 a month. I’d like it to be $500, or $1000. I want this to be his full-time job.

Reading the patreon page’s description of his process shows he’s taking it quite seriously. Steaming glue, removing staples. I’ve gone on record about the pros and cons of destructive scanning, but game magazines are not rare, just entirely unrepresented in scanned items compared to how many people have these things in their past.

I read something like this:

It is extremely unlikely that I will profit from your pledge any time soon. My scanner alone was over $4,000 and the scanning software was $600. Because I’m working with a high volume of high resolution 600 DPI images I purchased several hard drives including a CalDigit T4 20TB RAID array for $2,000. I have also spent several thousand dollars on the magazines themselves, which become more expensive as they become rarer. This is in addition to the cost of my computer, monitor, and other things which go into the creation of these scans. It may sound like I’m rich but really I’m just motivated, working two jobs and pursuing large projects.

…and all I think about is, this guy is doing so much amazing work that so many thousands could be benefiting from, and they should throw a few bucks at him for his time.

My work consists of carefully removing individual pages from magazines with a heat gun or staple-remover so that the entire page may be scanned. Occasionally I will use a stack paper cutter where appropriate and will not involve loss of page content. I will then scan the pages in my large format ADF scanner into 600 DPI uncompressed TIFFs. From there I either upload 300 DPI JPEGs for others to edit and release on various sites or I will edit them myself and store the 600 DPI versions in backup hard disks. I also take photos of magazines still factory-sealed to document their newsstand appearance. I also rip full ISOs of magazine coverdiscs and make scans of coverdisc sleeves on a color-corrected flatbed scanner and upload those to archive.org as well.

This is the sort of thing I can really get behind.

The Internet Archive is scanning stuff, to be sure, but the focus is on books. Magazines are much, much harder to scan – the book scanners in use are just not as easy to use with something bound like magazines are. The work that Mark is doing is stuff that very few others are doing, and to have canonical scans of the advertisements, writing and materials from magazines that used to populate the shelves is vital.

Some time ago, I’ve given all my collection of donated Game-related magazines to the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, because I recognized I couldn’t be scanning them anytime soon, and how difficult it was going to be to scan it. It would take some real major labor I couldn’t personally give.

Well, here it is. He’s been at it for a year. I’d like to see that monthly number jump to $100/month, $500/month, or more. People dropping $5/month towards this Patreon would be doing a lot for this particular body of knowledge.

Please consider doing it.

Thanks.


Categorised as: computer history | Internet Archive

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One Comment

  1. Jeremy says:

    Bit of a shame to destroy so much, but maybe it would be worse for it to vanish altogether. I doubt anyone will ever care enough to build a museum of physical print copies for anything more recent than the early 1900s…