When a magazine goes out of print and/or out of business, do the original 'master files' for each issue still exist somewhere?

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s. Some of them have found their way online thanks to preservationist efforts, but most are seemingly gone forever. (I'm talking about the particular magazine I read as a kid, many others have complete or near-complete collections available online in the form of scanned hardcopies.)

Do the publishing houses keep a digital copy of every magazine they release? If so, why don't they release them? They could probably charge a fee to download them, like other digital magazines do, but of course it'd be great if they just shared them for free for historical purposes on the Internet Archive or something.

It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no? 🤔 The raw files probably take up a few CDs' worth of space for the entire run of the magazine. Big assumptions on my part, I have no clue how any of it is done!

So:

  1. Do they retain the files forever?
  2. If so, why might they not be shared 20 or 30 years later?

Cheers!

masquenox ,

Thinking about the gaming magazines I used to read as a kid in the '90s.

I remember those fondly.

It would be an insanely short-sighted practice to not keep masters of these publications forever, no?

You're talking about capitalist organisations here... there's nothing about them that isn't short-sighted.

The raw files probably take up a few CDs’ worth of space for the entire run of the magazine.

Nope... just one cover page probably takes something around 300mbs at a minimum and could be a whole lot larger depending on the quality of the imagery used (if I remember my time in the printing/publishing industry correctly) Storage of already printed material in those days was always an afterthought.

Do they retain the files forever?

Highly unlikely - a lot of the storage just got dumped at one point or the other since there was really little reason (profit wise) to return to anything at all. There might still be an old Mac sitting around somebody's garage or backyard which still contains the stuff, but I won't be holding any hope out for that. There's always the chance that some employee still has the disks somewhere (you'd be amazed at how necessary it could be have proof that you actually did work somewhere and actually did work on this or that specific thing - the bosses were notoriously petty), and I suspect that's how a lot of stuff ends up on places like archive.org.

The corporates themselves don't give a shit - as soon as the profits roll in, it's all expendable as far as the overpaid geniuses in the fancy offices are concerned.

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