The Complete New Yorker

[Guest Chaney]

Sweet!

For the first time, every page of every issue of America's leading magazine—from full-color covers to spot drawings, from poetry to Profiles, from cartoons to advertisements—on reader friendly and highly searchable DVDs.

The Complete New Yorker covers The New Yorker's entire history, from February 1925 to February 2005, the magazine's 80th anniversary, providing a detailed yet panoramic history of the life of the city, the nation, and the world during the most exciting and astounding decades any society has ever known.

Quantities are limited. Reserve your copy today.

In stock by mid-September.

112pp - 9" x 12", Eight DVD-ROMS

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

DVD-ROM Drive

750 MB hard drive space

1024 x 768 minimum screen resolution

For Windows 2000 and XP

For Mac OS X 10.3 and higher

Our Price - $100.00

The New Yorker Store

$63 at Amazon

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June 2, 2005

80 Years of The New Yorker to Be Offered in Disc Form

By EDWARD WYATT

The New York Times

The New Yorker, the weekly magazine that started as "a hectic book of gossip, cartoons and facetiae," as Louis Menand once wrote, and has evolved into a citadel of narrative nonfiction and investigative reporting, will publish its entire 80-year archives on searchable computer discs this fall.

The collection, titled "The Complete New Yorker," will consist of eight DVD's containing high-resolution digital images of every page of the 4,109 issues of the magazine from February 1925 through the 80th anniversary issue, published last February. Included on the discs will be "every cover, every piece of writing, every drawing, listing, newsbreak, poem and advertisement," David Remnick, editor of the magazine, has written in an introduction to the collection.

The collection, which will also include a 123-page book containing Mr. Remnick's essay, a New Yorker timeline and highlights of selected pages from the magazine, is being published by the magazine and will be distributed to stores by Random House. It will have a cover price of $100, although it is likely to be sold in many bookstores and online for considerably less. The magazine also plans to issue annual updates to the disc collection, and it expects a first printing of 200,000 copies.

While innumerable neurotic New Yorker fanatics have saved piles of the magazine in closets or basements, the few easily accessible archives of the magazine's contents have been on microfilm or in bound volumes in public libraries. But those media hold little attraction for younger readers, Mr. Remnick said, and too frequently go unused. "Students who rely on Google as a turbo-charged Library of Alexandria feel no more eager to use microfilm than they do to pick up a protractor and a needle-nosed compass," Mr. Remnick states in his introduction.

The project is an amalgam of technology, stealth, insurance considerations and economics that was first discussed more than seven years ago. It was overseen, and long kept secret, by Edward Klaris, general counsel for the magazine, and Pamela Maffei McCarthy, its deputy editor. In early 2004, two staff members drove two copies of each issue of the magazine to Kansas City in a rented truck to have them digitally scanned.

The magazine's card catalog, which over time has come to include more than 1.5 million index cards containing citations and cross-references to articles and which forms the backbone of the search function on the discs, was scanned at the magazine's office in Manhattan after discussions with the publication's insurance company found the catalog to be "irreplaceable and beyond value," Mr. Remnick said.

It was only recently that digital technologies evolved to allow for the high-resolution reproduction of small type, making the project feasible, Mr. Klaris said. Digital videodiscs were used rather than CD's, he said, because much more information can be stored on each DVD. The DVD's are for use only in a computer drive, however, and will not work on a television DVD player.

A user of the disc is presented with each page of the magazine, which can be displayed singularly or in pairs, and the viewer can flip from page to page through each issue. Alternatively, a user can search on any disc for an author, artist, title or subject or by key words, and then move to the appropriate disc to view the material. Copies of the cover images can also be viewed in close-up detail or in thumbnail collections.

The collection also has one other important feature, which allows a reader to page through each magazine by flipping directly to the cartoons. As Mr. Remnick admits, "Ninety percent of our subscribers say they read the cartoons first, and the rest would be lying."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

July 1, 2005

New Yorker DVD archive is almost history before it starts

Charlie Anderson

Staff Writer, Kansas City Business Journal

Business doesn't always follow the blueprint.

Nobody knows that better than Vince Pingel, managing director of Western Blue Print, a 100-year-old Kansas City company.

In October, Pingel's handiwork will hit the masses in the form of "The Complete New Yorker," a $100, eight-DVD set of all 4,109 copies of the iconic magazine, which Western scanned for posterity.

The release will cap a seven-year struggle to start the project, which was besieged by a U.S. Supreme Court decision, insurance questions about shipping priceless original copies to Kansas City and the magazine's skepticism about making money on the archive.

Both parties declined to give the value of the deal.

The groundwork for the project began in 1997, when a small Lenexa company owned by Pingel was creating industry buzz after scanning all 1,200 issues of National Geographic for a 32-disc CD-ROM set.

That project opened up the possibility among publishers that they could tap a new revenue stream selling historical copies. Pingel scanned MAD magazine's catalog, and The New Yorker called.

It was enough to persuade Western Blue Print, Kansas City's dominant blueprint producer, to buy Pingel's company, Document Automation Development, in 1999.

But in 2001, the Supreme Court handed down a decision against The New York Times, disallowing the electronic distribution of archived stories done by freelancers who had copyrights on the material.

Pingel knew the lawsuits against National Geographic would come in droves considering all the freelance work in the copies he scanned. Worse, a contract that would have indemnified his company was never signed.

Pingel and the company's lawyers braced for the worst.

"I just hoped we would never be named," Pingel said. "I thought: 'This could be huge. This could kill us.'"

In the summer of 2003, The New Yorker's general counsel, Edward Claris, called Pingel. National Geographic had been sued 26 times but had never lost. And Pingel's company was never named as a defendant.

The courts were making a key distinction. The Kansas City firm had simply reproduced the entire contents of National Geographic. In contrast, The New York Times lifted text from its stories and reformatted them on the Web.

Pingel said this was a technical decision National Geographic made in 1997 to scan the entire page -- ads and all -- instead of lifting searchable text, which proved costly and error-prone. Had they gone down the latter road, the courts may have considered that reformatting like The New York Times.

"I was lucky," Pingel said.

That brought The New Yorker back to the table. Claris had long sought to offer up a digital collection of the magazine, which includes such gems as a profile of Adolph Hitler in 1936 and poems by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

"It's an amazing treasure trove," Claris said.

[ghost of miles]

That's going to be an amazing collection. I keep meaning to pick up The Complete Doonesbury, but I think this set might overtake it on the priority list.

[jazzbo]

Although not something I really aspire to own, that seems like an amazing amount of material for the price!

[Dave James]

I can barely keep up with the weekly editions. What in the world would I do with 80 years of this stuff? I'd be reading from now until I put my cue back in the rack. The problem with the New Yorker is if you don't read just about every issue from cover to cover, you run the risk of missing some little tweak or nuance that can leave you laughing or crying. Some mighty fine writing going on here. It's the only magazine I subscribe to or read anymore.

Up over and out.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Yes, I am all over this and have been since I first got word of it. Holy crap - $63 - and there will probably be somewhere that has it for less. Good gracious. Apart from the articles and the covers and the cartoons, it's a researcher's dream. The New Yorker did quite a good job of keeping track of New York club listings.

Mike

[Brownian Motion]

Although not something I really aspire to own, that seems like an amazing amount of material for the price!

←

[jazzbo]

Now, if I could flip the pages and look at the pictures and cartoons while waiting for my wife to decide what earrings she's going to wear before we can leave . . .

[7/4]

I can barely keep up with the weekly editions. 

←

Same here! I get hand me downs from my Dad every week or two and I never really finish 'em any more. I do try to check out the cartoons and scan for interesting articles.

Good throne readin'

[Michael Fitzgerald]

Walmart.com has this for $59 - that's less than 75 cents per year.

Anyone get it yet?

Mike

[J Larsen]

I ordered it from Amazon in early July and it still hasn't shipped yet.

I've heard from someone who actually has it that the search feature is very limited, however. Evidently it only searches article titles and abstracts. That's a bit of a bummer, given that they adverstised it as "fully searchable". But for $63, I'm not going to complain too much (once I finally get it, that is...)

[montg]

This is probably a dumb question, but that's never stopped me before. I'm assuming it's possible to print the articles. Is that correct? If it is, I just finished my Christmas list

[montg]

Well, I just checked over at amazon,and the description indicates:

Print any pages or covers you choose, or bookmark pages with your own notes.

Dumb question, I should have just checked. This is a great value. I mean, Whitney Balliet's writings and all the other jazz material--that alone makes this worthwhile to me. Add all the cultural history, movie reviews, book reviews, biographical features--this is too good to be true!

[Christiern]

I just ordered it from Wal*Mart (thanks for the tip, Michael),

[Jazzmoose]

So, can ya get just the cartoons?

[Michael Fitzgerald]

See last paragraph of first article posted.

Mike

[ejp626]

Re: the cartoons, that's actually quite interesting, since they are essentially undercutting their other product, which was a thick book of cartoons from the New Yorker with a CD (or DVD) containing all the cartoons. I was close to buying that, but this would be the better product.

Too bad searching is limited. Maybe there will be a way to import the data into another program with full search abilities.

[Christiern]

Something I always looked forward to--even more than the cartoons--were the samples of poor editing in other publications. They were often hilarious and The New Yorker was one of the few publications that could reprint them without becoming the pot calling the kettle black.

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

excellent value...although the stream (trickle?) of technical glitch comments at Amazon is less than encouraging. Hopefully it'll enjoy blockbuster sales and others will follow suit. The collection I'd like to see.

[Jazzmoose]

I must confess, the only time I've ever sat and devoured years worth of any magazine was when I discovered about 150 years worth of bound copies of Puck in the library back in my college days. Don't know if I really have time to justify the purchase of anything like this (he says while more CDs than he could ever possibly hope to listen to lie close by...)

[ejp626]

I must confess, the only time I've ever sat and devoured years worth of any magazine was when I discovered about 150 years worth of bound copies of Puck in the library back in my college days.  Don't know if I really have time to justify the purchase of anything like this (he says while more CDs than he could ever possibly hope to listen to lie close by...)

←

That's very true. In fact, I recently cancelled my subscription to the New Yorker, since I really can't keep up with more than one weekly magazine at a time (and the Economist is the one I chose). In fact, I hadn't planned to keep it up at all after I moved away from NYC, but they gave me such a great "professional rate" that I really couldn't refuse. But with the second move, the shipping to England thing became the deciding factor.

That said, I did pick up the National Geographic on DVD, figuring that my son could use it for school projects and such when he is older. Still, I am certainly tempted to get the New Yorker on DVD -- maybe I'll wait for some reviews here about the quality of the covers and the cartoons.

[J Larsen]

Too bad searching is limited.  Maybe there will be a way to import the data into another program with full search abilities.

←

There is no data to import. The files are all scanned images. I guess you could try OCRing, but I wouldn't get my hopes up too high.

Edited September 25, 2005 by J Larsen

[ejp626]

Hmm -- too bad. Any idea of the resolution of the images? Better than the cartoon book, where people were griping?

[Big Wheel]

Too bad searching is limited.  Maybe there will be a way to import the data into another program with full search abilities.

←

There is no data to import. The files are all scanned images. I guess you could try OCRing, but I wouldn't get my hopes up too high.

←

This is kind of a shame, since it probably wouldn't take too long for the New Yorker to just OCR the stuff and then index it with Google. (You could do this at home, too, but it would probably take forever to clean everything up.) It would be cool if future versions had some kind of program that could access an index on the Internet or something. It'd probably be pretty simple--just go to newyorker.com, Google whatever you want, and then look up the appropriate page on the DVD.

Edited September 26, 2005 by Big Wheel

[Brownian Motion]

I found out that I am unable to use the program on my regular computer, which runs Windows Milllenium. It only works on Windows 2000 or higher. Damn.

[Michael Fitzgerald]

But read that second article posted here - isn't the lack of OCR the reason why we are able to have this in the end?

Mike