RE: Compute! (February 1989)
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I used to visit outofprintarchive fairly regularly but it's probably been a few years since I've checked out what's new there. These days it seems like everything winds up on archive.org eventually. Whether legal or not I don't know. They even had some of the telephone book size Computer Shopper's show up recently. I wondered if any of those would ever get scanned. I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to do it...
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I helped start Out of Print Archive but life got in the way, and I had nothing that could legally be distributed so it was hard to keep the passion for the project when I was working 40+ hours a week at my day job. I know Meppi, the main guy doing edits there, is absolutely amazing at his craft.
I know one magazine, scanned fairly decently can take a few minutes per page to prepare so a 400+ page Computer Shopper? Yeah, no. Lol.
I think most owners of these publications view preservation as just that, preservation. There is no real market for capitalizing on the old issues. I worked the deal with Gamefan Magazine, and Electronic Gaming Monthly (which included the second iteration of Electronic Games) but both owners of those publications were only interested in offering their stuff via custom apps they had created (rather than more mainstream options, or just going free with them). That sucked but we tried to make the partnership work with both before it fell through (Gamefan, I believe was due to typical Gamefan B.S. - most of the horror stories you hear from former workers are about what we went through in that process as well).
Sometimes it is true, it is best to not meet your heroes and ruin your view of them.
Those computer shoppers got up to 800+ pages. The March 1993 issue I just glanced at was 873 pages. You have to be pretty motivated to scan those.
I started scanning magazines I had (mostly VG&CE and Commodore magazines) back near the turn of the century. It was a pretty slow process because I was doing it non-destructively using a flatbed scanner. But I also didn't do any post processing. If I got the whole page, it was readable and mostly straight, I was happy. I was never involved in any organized effort and once others started doing it better and faster I was happy to let that personal project go.
Doing these posts gives me an excuse to look through these old magazines, many of which I never had. Doing a post on an 800+ page issue of Computer Shopper should be fun...
Early on, I just scanned the content pages and not the ads because I was only interested in the content (and ads usually carried over from month to month or mag to mag). I would scan the ad once and just slip it in when I saw it used in another issue. Some got mad because that is not the ad from that issue so I lost a lot of interest at that pettiness.
I was using a flat bed scanner too. I was dropping over 30+ hours a month on this type of thing and spending around $100 a month buying issues I didn't have and no one had preserved yet.
That was before I got into it hardcore and shortly after that, life got in the way of putting that much effort into a hobby so I stopped and moved over to promotion and working on deals with publishers. I was able to broker a couple video games like this over the years as well (and probably turned a few game owners into penny pinchers wanting money for a 30+ year old NES game they didn't even know they owned).
I cannot wait to see what you put together to showcase a Computer Shopper issue. That should be interesting as there is so much in each issue.