Is there interest in Japanese official strategy guides?

[kitsunebi]

3 hours ago, KiwiArcader said:

That is precisely the elitist type of attitude Meppi/Triverse used when banning me back in the day. Now, I know you are nothing like those two people but you do see how that comment comes across right? 

Given the sheer lack of people scanning computing/gaming magazines for preservation I would have thought Phillyman would be happy to accept submissions in either format as long as they met whatever criteria he defined in regard to quality (resolution, page size, cropping etc) far more so than the file type itself. Still, I have no concerns one way or the other as I have my own website but I can tell you this was one of the reasons I decided to stop making files available here.

What I will say though is that IF you choose to adopt this attitude towards people submitting PDF's and they don't want to use CBR's for whatever reason then you are pushing away the very people that you moan about not seeing enough of around here which is just plain daft. If they want a home for their PDF's they can head on over to my website. I hate advertising it here like this but I'd rather keep ANY people prepared to scan mags in the scene rather than have them dropping out due to archaic rules created a decade ago.

I don't think it comes off as elitist at all.  I'm not saying that PDF is inferior in any way.  I'm just saying that it gives people less freedom than an archive of JPGs.

If we switched to uploading un-zipped/un-RARed folders of JPGs instead of CBRs, that would be fine with me, too.   People who want CBRs can just zip them up, and people wanting PDFs can convert them.  (EDIT: on second thought, that would be ridiculous. No point making people download hundreds of files instead of one. But leaving the extension as .rar would be fine (if completely pointless.)

Or if we offered both CBRs and PDFs so people could pick their poison, that would be fine.  I'm just opposed to offering ONLY PDFs, because it puts too much restriction on access to the scanned JPGs.

I second your final comment, though, and strongly encourage anyone who feels adamantly that magazine scans should only be allowed in PDF format to upload at your site (which is an outstanding contributor to the hobby) or else at the Internet Archive, where anything goes.  It seems a bit silly to me to not want people to have the freedom to choose how they view their files, but if anyone feels that strongly about it, I definitely hope they would choose to upload their files elsewhere rather than not scan anything at all.

[KiwiArcader]

Pushing people away from scanning is the last thing we should be doing.

While there should be some standards to ensure mags are preserved in a readable format such as a minimum DPI scanning resolution like 300DPI and not reducing page dimensions in pixels too far from their original size I am somewhat of a realist in that I'd rather have previously unscanned content in any form than not at all. That could be raw scans that I need to edit or even final scans processed at 150DPI if nothing else is available as it means I can at the very least make a missing magazine available now and keep it until such time as a better copy becomes available. And if nothing else ever comes along then there's one less missing magazine anyway albeit in less than optimal condition but again, it's better than yet another M.I.A magazine!!

Sometimes I think people like Meppi lose sight of the fact that there are thousands upon thousands of magazines out there that are completely M.I.A or have really, really poor existing scans and that putting a months worth of effort into one mag or playing around continually with one of his existing scans to get it even "better" actually does very little to move the situation forward. He might have 5000 mags in his collection but the fact is, due to his methodology he is simply never going to get through even a decent portion of his collection in his lifetime so all those people who sent him magazines believing they would at some point have a digital copy to replace the physical issue they donated are in for disappointment. That's pretty sad.

I think Phillyman may have finally realised this dilemma himself of which I have spoken of here several times in the past as he is now pumping out raw scans in the hope that people will edit them. The BIG thing here is that he is scanning the content much faster than previously as without the raw scans a missing mag is still a missing mag.

I just see forcing a particular format upon someone submitting a magazine as merely another potential impediment to getting missing magazines scanned. If someone submits an image based PDF and I think it needs work I extract the pages and it's not particularly costly to have that ability ($60) therefore to me it's a not an issue receiving a file in any of the common  formats.

[kitsunebi]

24 minutes ago, KiwiArcader said:

I think Phillyman may have finally realised this dilemma himself of which I have spoken of here several times in the past as he is now pumping out raw scans in the hope that people will edit them. The BIG thing here is that he is scanning the content much faster than previously as without the raw scans a missing mag is still a missing mag.

I just see forcing a particular format upon someone submitting a magazine as merely another potential impediment to getting missing magazines scanned. If someone submits an image based PDF and I think it needs work I extract the pages and it's not particularly costly to have that ability ($60) therefore to me it's a not an issue receiving a file in any of the common  formats.

I think the major change was that Phillyman and E-Day finally got ADF scanners.  And since they use a paper cutter to debind, no careful gutter-side restoration needs doing, and thus the editing is really nothing more than a matter of straightening the odd page that fed through crooked and maybe running the entire mag through a batch adjustment action with a single button press, allowing E-Day to edit a mag or more per day.

And as the last word here (from me.  I hope.) on PDFs...

The policy of using CBRs here is already in place, so there's no need to debate what format we'll be hosting. 

But here's the reasoning again, which (again) has nothing to do with which is a better format for reading (which is a debate about particular reader software and not file format, anyway):

Anyone who scans anything will initially be left with a folder of jpgs (EDIT: yeah, I guess they could be TIFFs.  But no one in their right mind is gonna share those..)  Even after they edit those scans, they're still left with a folder of jpgs.  I'm confident that anyone who isn't my mom has a copy of WinRAR or 7Zip or whatever already installed on their computer, so it should be no hassle whatsoever for them to zip up that folder of jpgs and send them our way if hosting them here is their intent.  I disagree that asking them to do so is somehow preventing them from sharing their scan (unless of course, they are of the opinion that their release should only ever be available in PDF format, in which case, they probably aren't fans of our site in the first place.) 

And again, the reason we prefer that folder of jpgs (since that's all a CBR is) is so that everyone is free to access those jpgs and do whatever they want with them - turn them into a screensaver, upload individual pages to a message board, crop all photos of Shigeru Miyamoto into a giant collage/shrine, or convert them to a PDF for their viewing pleasure.  They will have that option, and it won't cost them a thing.

[JonnyCGood]

High on my Japanese guidebook wishlist would be the Konami Official Guides for Silent Hill games. As far as I know, only the Play Novel one has been scanned. Here is a list of them:

http://www.silenthillmemories.net/publications/guides_en.htm

[kitsunebi]

1 hour ago, JonnyCGood said:

High on my Japanese guidebook wishlist would be the Konami Official Guides for Silent Hill games. As far as I know, only the Play Novel one has been scanned. Here is a list of them:

http://www.silenthillmemories.net/publications/guides_en.htm

I have the guide for Silent Hill Zero, but it's too new to be uploaded.  Even though Konami's interest in gaming these days is pretty much exclusively devoted to pachinko and rhythm games, they're definitely still in business, so we've got to treat the guides as "still in publication."  In another 4 years the 15-year rule will apply, though...