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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

Could have sworn they did this years ago. I even have the first 80 years or whatever on DVD in the closet.

Normally when laymen say "digitized" they mean one of two things: scanned images in a PDF or fully transcribed (and possible formatted) text extracted from the scan. The Complete New Yorker you're thinking of was mostly the former, with a bit of indexing (table of contents pointing to the PDFs if I remember correctly).

This latest digitization project does the latter, transcribing the text into their existing content management system and as far as I can tell, preserving much of the formatting. This comes with full text search, allows cross linking between articles, and all that good stuff.

I suspect that since they include an LLM summary and started this digitization project in early 2024, this was enabled by LLMs.

If I’m reading this correctly, they now have all their historic articles loaded into their CMS. I think they previously just had a system where you could page (and maybe search?) through scans of old issues, which is also cool but not as versatile.

When a lot of content was being put out on CD/DVD, a number of publications did but they are not straightforwardly accessible these days because they're usually on an old version of Windows. (Yes, if you want to make a project of it, you can probably get into them but has never been worth it for me.)

doesn't wine have old versions of mswindows pretty much nailed?

I think the disc release GP is talking about had files in DjVu format.

Encrypted DjVu, and the viewer doesn‘t run on modern Windows.

It runs great on windows 11. The install took a long time but I didn’t have to do anything special to make it work

Maybe we have different editions? I never got mine to work.

Usually Windows/Wine is the much better case than the old Mac apps (32bit, PPC etc) in the age of Apple Silcon

https://old.reddit.com/r/thenewyorker/comments/1jlhrve/instr...

Breaking the DJVU DRM would be the perfect solution though

It has been broken. I actually have the set on my desk ready to rip, I just couldn't find my USB DVD drive.

Here's a link to the guy that broke it:

https://github.com/reconSuave/PlayboyPDF/

Last I checked, he had Playboy and Rolling Stone ready, but not New Yorker. Any updates?

I have the MAD archives bought in 90s on CDs but can't use..

I have MAD archives somewhere. I thought they were in some standard format but maybe not.

A lot of the gen 1 or so CD content isn't easily accessible although a more industrious person could probably get to it in some manner.

I have the CD backed up as ISO files which I can mount. Since these days laptops don't have CD players.

Need to try on latest windows 11 I gave up earlier. For a while had a windows 2000 virtual machine that worked.

The issues on the Absolutely MAD DVD (1952-2005) are just plain PDF files, no DRM, they work perfectly

https://files.catbox.moe/x4np6u.png

The CDs I have seem to be proprietary for Windows from the late 90s. But I also have PDFs through 2005 on my computer which I must have "acquired" at some point.

The browser app might be some outdated Windows application, that's the case with the MAD DVD too, but you can find the actual issue files in some folders

Yes the file names are something unknown. It has a software to access. They did a damn good job.

For instance, in Disk 1, there is a big binary file mad.m1 492MB. That seems to hold content, but not sure what file type or which program can open it. Rest of the files are very small.

No mine were pre dvd era. In CD. Older. They had a surprisingly good UI with its own funny stuff. Your install that and insert the disk 1-7 based on which issue you select. Even scold you for installing wrong disk & comments about 'you can insert a CD of Yanni if you prefer screeching' or something like that. Lol don't know what mad has against him their comments are always funny.

Surprisingly, this has been a project I’ve been tinkering with for years. There is an easy way to get the raw png/jpeg files out, but it does require a windows box. Im planning on working on it more over the long holiday.

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