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Thought about sharing my collection (20,000 scanned mags from all kinds of sources)


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So over the years I collected this collection of mine (1 GB, reasonably compressed, OCR for text searches in various languages) and would like to perhaps share in some way, also so I could recover it in case if something happened and I lost it. Please tell me if you have any suggestions, I never did it online before. 

Also a member for years, but yes only my first post or any other activity other than downloading (and then turning into these pdfs of mine).

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I guess your best bet is to create a torrent somewhere.

Assuming it's only 1 GB as you said, you could always upload it to Google Drive, but I'm assuming you made a (really big) typo, since 20,000 mags would gave to be  about 50KB each to take up only 1 GB of space :lol:  Maybe you meant 1 TB?

We can't host anything here, of course.  The only magazines we host in our download section are those scanned and edited by Retromags members.  Stuff found elsewhere is not allowed.

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2 hours ago, LiterallyHitler said:

Maybe the Internet Archive would be interested in hosting this for an instant download, instead of just separate magazines?

No idea.  Never heard of "instant download" at the IA.

 

2 hours ago, LiterallyHitler said:

1 TB, yeah.

I once tried to private torrent-seed something but it didn't seemed to work. Maybe a public torrent would work better. Would you be interested in something like that? (I suppose you have some publishing date limitations like oldmags do.)

Me personally?  No, torrents aren't allowed by ISPs in Japan.  I tried torrenting through a VPN years ago and my ISP throttled my connection to dial-up speed just on their un-provable suspicion that I might be torrenting.  So ever since then, I've avoided them.

As I said before, Retromags really can't be affiliated with your collection in any capacity.  We only host mags our members have scanned themselves, and as you said, your mags come from all different sources, plus on top of that, you've recompressed them and made PDFs.  So by all means, make your collection available somewhere...it just can't be here.:)

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You're free to post about it here, we just can't host any of the files.  But if you upload them somewhere else, you're welcome to let people know in the forums.

I don't mean to sound disinterested or ungrateful.  We just have certain rules about what we host on this site (i.e. only mags scanned by Retromags members).  But that doesn't mean we disapprove of non-Retromags releases being discussed or linked to.

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These days, what mags AREN'T defunct, amirite? 

Seriously though.  Retromags has a cut-off policy of 10 years (if the mag is defunct) or 15 years (if the mag is still in print.)  Anything printed after those cut-offs is not allowed (though the cut-off moves forward a year every Jan.1)

Of course, those are our rules. If you're just creating some torrent somewhere, any concerns over whatever content you include would be a matter between you and the assorted copyright owners/your ISP.  But yeah, it would be best to stick to older stuff, especially if you're planning on hyping it here.

I guess a question that hasn't been asked yet is, what would you say is the appeal of what you're intending to do?  What I mean is, what are you offering that can't be gotten elsewhere?  Do you have lots of issues that aren't already being hosted at the various magazine preservation sites?  Or is the main selling point of your collection the fact that you've recompressed everything into smaller PDFs for people who are more concerned with storage space than quality?  Just curious.

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Well, last piece of advice.  Many scanners (including myself) find it annoying and disrespectful when people take scans we worked hard to make look good and then shrink or compress them (lowering their quality) before spreading them elsewhere.  We have no problem with you sharing the original files, and you're free to do whatever you want with them for your own personal use -- what bothers us is that by distributing compressed files, you're spreading inferior copies of our work and undermining the effort we put into making a high quality scan.

There's a particular website out there that does this habitually (they shrink all of our files to "around 100MB or less") and as a sign of goodwill they started including a message on the page of all mags taken from us that explained that the scan originated on Retromags, that the copy they were distributing had been compressed, and that the original full quality file can be downloaded from Retromags.  I won't lie - it still bugs the hell out of me, but at least people who download their content are aware that they're getting a low quality copy and are told where they can find the originals if they're interested.

Just something to keep in mind.

 

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On 4/7/2018 at 6:21 PM, LiterallyHitler said:

1 TB, yeah.

I once tried to private torrent-seed something but it didn't seemed to work. Maybe a public torrent would work better. Would you be interested in something like that? (I suppose you have some publishing date limitations like oldmags do.)

Over at Archive.org, you can actually just upload everything in one huge file and they'll host it all in various formats(torrent, zip, rar, etc). That "Sketch the Cow" guy did it a while back with a bunch of mags he had uploaded. He uploaded them all individually, but then also did one huge 23gb upload that included all of them at once. I'm not sure what their size limit would be, but even if you had to break it up into chunks, it'd definitely be easier than doing it one by one. I notice a lot of people asking the question of size limit, and though various answers are given, if you tell them what you're trying to upload and its size, it seems like they'll give you an email address to contact them directly so they can help you do it.

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On 11.04.2018 at 9:58 PM, amorri40 said:

Would you be able to give a list of all the files? There are programs that can take a directory and list all the files in all the subfolders, would be great to see what it contains :)

Only the expired magazines:

https://pastebin.com/2x3UK2eM

https://pastebin.com/uEv2zaWR

https://pastebin.com/QeRunzwb

https://pastebin.com/hFC13TUY

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On 4/20/2018 at 12:37 PM, GabrielMP19 said:

Do you have old editions from PC Gamer (mostly from the 90s)? I would love to have a complete collection of them.

You and me both.  But as he said in the OP, his collection is stuff he downloaded from here and there online and recompressed into smaller PDFs, not original scans.  So any issues of PC Gamer he might have are the same issues already available (currently spread across several different websites.)  The sad fact is that a good portion of PC Gamer (USA) has yet to be scanned by anyone, so a complete set is just a dream for now.

In the meantime, be sure to check out our scans of the mags the eventually became PC Gamer: Game Player's PC Strategy Guide, which later switched its name to Game Players PC Entertainment, before finally relaunching as...PC Gamer.  I'm working on the first issue under the PC Entertainment title now...

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Wow I remember Maximum PC...

I know the magazines are probably worthless on ebay today, but I have kept mine since the 90s in perfect pristine condition.

 

Couldn't afford of course all magazines could only get a few but I kept them in pristine condition. Like new with all the freebies perfect.

I still have the first mag I ever owned.

Really bad condition but hand me down I kept the magazine in the same condition I got.

 

PSM was a good mag too.

 

I got really nostalgic does anybody knows what happened to the CVG team? where is Ed Lomas now, Steve Key, the entire team? Been looking them up for ages. Kinda miss  the silly lads. lol

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I already mentioned them above, coincidentally.  My favorite mag started as "Game Player's PC Strategy Guide" before later changing its title to "Game Players PC Entertainment."  The month following its final issue, the mag was relaunched as PC Gamer (the American mag from GP Publications).  The three titles are really one continuous mag in my mind, and I love them all.  Of course, the UK version of PC Gamer published by Future was never as good, in my opinion, so I was quite disappointed when PC Gamer USA was bought out by Future and became nothing but a reprint of the UK version.  But my gaming interests lie almost exclusively in the late 80s-90s, anyway, so all of the issues I'm interested in were published before the buyout.

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