Galaxy Magazine: Free Texts | Hacker News Reader

Galaxy Magazine: Free Texts

archive.org

196 pointsanthraxstars23 comments

If you want to bulk-download all of the issues, here's how to do it with wget.

https://blog.archive.org/2012/04/26/downloading-in-bulk-usin...

I have all these and several others on a ubooquity server so I can read it on glorious tablets to clear my head before I go to sleep at night.

https://vaemendis.net/ubooquity/

Here's some more!

https://archive.org/details/amazingstoriesmagazine

Want more?

https://archive.org/details/pulpmagazinearchive

Sometimes you just have to step back and say "damn, the Internet Archive is the best thing ever on the internet"

Give them money!

To add to your last sentence, you can setup recurring donations and they are tax deductible. They are one of my favorite sites to donate to.

So what's Ubooquity do for a tablet reader? It isn't clear from the site ...

It displays books and PDFs as web pages with large hot spots to turn pages. It takes just a few minutes to set up so it's worth it to give it a whirl.

I do wish somebody would crank out an easy to use desktop GUI tool for this.

edit this will make it better

https://gareth.halfacree.co.uk/2013/04/bulk-downloading-coll...

and

https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive

The last time this was posted we got a top comment by the magazine's creator's grandson:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11185490

The ebook versions could use some editing, right now it's just a jumble of OCR'd text without much formatting or chapter headings etc...

That would be a lot of work obviously, it's fantastic that the scans are available in the first place.

A related project: http://www.pulpmags.org/index.htm

The text fixing could be crowdsourced by putting it on github.

I wonder what the license situation is though...

Exactly; Gutenberg/pgdp won't accept stuff published after ~1930 because it is too hard to clear copyright. In the case of an anthology mag you have overlapping copyrights of the mag and the authors of the stories.

It looks like the magazine itself didn't have the copyright renewed back when that was mandatory, so the pre-1964 issues are out of copyright as far as the magazine's own copyright goes (which is probably why archive.org feels comfortable putting them up). But yeah some subset of the individual stories are probably still copyrighted, so PG would avoid it.

Project Gutenberg also has some tools and process for crowdsourcing text fixing that could be adapted. (If copyright issues could be dealt with.)

   https://www.pgdp.net

So who's going to volunteer to lead such an effort?

More than half of these are not properly catalogued. Note to self: donate to archive.org

This is so cool. Even the cover art is awesome!

Any particularly major recommendations for a reader?

Check out "The Laxian Key" and "Prospector's Special" by Robert Sheckley:

* https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1954-11/Galaxy_195...

* https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1959-12/Galaxy_195...

My other favorite is Watchbird:

https://archive.org/stream/galaxymagazine-1953-02/Galaxy_195...

Lot's of his other stories were published in the Galaxy.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Sheckley_short_stories_...

Depending on how experimental you like your science fiction, Moorcock-era (1964+) New Worlds magazine.

* one I found that I'll read: https://archive.org/details/New_Worlds_171v50_1967-03

There's something about this era that I've always liked. Maybe because these old pulps were my first lesson that scifi =/= space opera.

This cover has always freaked me out:

https://archive.org/details/galaxymagazine-1954-09

Random OT fact of the day:

The man on the cover is wearing one of those mirrors on his forehead that you often see in older photos of doctors. Thanks to Google and Wikipedia, I can now report what it is called ("head mirror") and what it was used for (to provide illumination for ear, nose, and throat exams). [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_mirror

Thank you!

Just read Fredric Brown's Honeymoon in Hell in the November 1950 issue. Made me smile, gave me a little hope that perhaps we might all get on together after all.

Could never understand why Fredric Brown wasn't better known.

That is truly awesome.

First story: The Fireman by Ray Bradbury

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