Amiga Magazines

[alenppc]

There are very few mags alive left anywhere sadly...

My favourite English language mags were the Amiga Format (UK) and CU Amiga (UK) but at the time they were really pricey so I couldn't afford them except a few issues now and then.

Also, thanks to a lot of work we have managed to preserve the almost complete collection of the former Italian Amiga Magazine (sometimes judged as one of the "best amiga magazines on the planet") and scan almost every single issue -- which is available on www.amigamagazine.info, and yes, a large portion of the work was done by yours truly. ;-) Yes, the stuff has been published legally.

I would love to be able to do something similar with AF and CU, but sadly I have no funds to buy collections of various issues in order to start scanning them. Not to mention a new scanner, cause thousands of pages of AM killed my current scanner. I'm not even sure how many people would be willing to part with their collection, and a large sum might be required in order to convince them... not to mention pay for the shipping... :-x

Also I have no idea whether those could ever be published - or if indeed there is a way of obtaining any sort of perimission from the current copyright owners. Sigh...

[alenppc]

dandelion wrote:
I've got over 100 UK Amiga magazines back at the family home, decaying slowly in the garage. It's been my plan for a while to scan these all in. What I really want to do is scan in the complete set of each magazine, collect the accompanying cover disks, and release it to the world via torrent or whatever. Future Publishing, ex publishers of Amiga Format, Amiga Shopper would probably go crazy if you stuck these on a website, but I figure via torrent or P2P there's not much they can do to stop it. My philosophy is this, by releasing such material into the public domain, it will benefit A LOT more people than it would harm.

I agree 100% there, but obtaining permission *might* not be that difficult. After all, publishers like Future and such have already given permission for publication of mags dedicated to 8-bit machines (C64 and ZX Spectrum alike) so I think it probably shouldn't be too difficult to get it if you ask nicely enough. I mean it would be worth a try if nothing else...

I'm already paying out of my pocket for the whole AM hosting, and I've got lots of spare space and bandwidth. I wouldn't mind hosting another mag, but it would HAVE to be legal otherwise I would be in trouble.