Sure, but hardly anyone has an HD DVD-ROM drive in his computer. Only now that DVD-ROM is finally ubiquitous can they justify using it for things like games and these archives on a regular basis.

Yes, unless the images are much more highly compressed than the Marvel comics, it will take a number of discs to hold all the images. The Fantastic Four DVD, for example, is about 6GB, and claims to hold "550 complete comic books." Call it an average of 30 pages each (some were annuals) and that's 16,500 pages.

The RS announcement says 115,000 pages; at the same compression rate that would be about 41GB, or at least 5 DVDs.

Unwieldy for sure, unless you have enough storage to copy the whole thing to your hard drive (which I easily do, but it's a lot to ask).

But HD-DVD? It will be a long, long time before I have an HD drive of any kind in my PC.

R

Any word on a release date for this?

These sets all sound awesome until you realize that the scan / image quality on all of them is beyond atrocious. Marvel / Nat. Geo / the New Yorker, all of them have been so bad. When will the producers of all of these projects learn that scanning their pages in anything less than 300 dpi just won't cut it?

Now we are going to get 115,000 pages of Rolling Stones? Will they be in 72 dpi? Probably. And compressed-to hell in JPEGs also, no doubt. Their reasoning will be "Oh, we did that for copyright reasons, We don't want people printing legible copies of the old issues." The same argument was made on the New Yorker set. It is all a bullshit concern.

A better idea is to release these magazines to the digital format by decade. Then quality could be stepped up to at least 300 dpi, and the archivists among us would be happy.

Now, we get the tantalizing news that Playboy also is getting its release into the digital realm. That one better be 30 DVDs to be of reasonable quality. But, they will probably cram it all into ONE 8.5 GB DVD! Worse than Useless and criminal in my opinion!

did anyone get this? how's the quality like and are you able to print the articles to read them away from the computer?

Discussions on the Amazon.com entry for the product seem to indicate that the files aren't PDF (as for what format they're really in, I haven't found that out yet), and that you can print the pages out. I'll wait a while before I make a decision on this. While I do enjoy the magazine (enough to buy all the 40th anniversary issues), and would like to read the companion book, I'm still just a casual reader, and I don't need the included subscription coupon. I wouldn't have time to go scrolling through years worth of issues, although if the price ever drops a little, I might consider picking this up.

You're completely right. Which is why Playboy should drop all of their shitty, soft-focus airbrushed pictorials and just release a DVD of every interview they've done, which are almost always fantastic reads, no matter who the subject is.

They did release a CD rom of their interviews about a decade ago...

Yeah, but it's long OOP and like you said, about 10 - 12 years old. They've also released a quartet of books with themed interview subjects, but still, it'd be nice to have them all on one handy DVD. They can even throw in select articles to help fill out space.