As a continuation on my quest to find out what to do with my old magazines…

The Magazine Archive at World of Spectrum

One idea I had was to scan in all old magazines and after that either throw them away, sell them or store them in a far away place (a future post might show the final decision). Of course the Internet already has digital archives of computer magazines. One location that archives old computer magazine scans specifically around the ZX Spectrum is World of Spectrum. You can find a list here: http://www.worldofspectrum.org/magazines/ (it points to the FTP site which is heaven on earth for retro gamers).

And although I don’t know exactly what to do with the old magazines I do realize that there are a lot of people out there who either share a passion for retro gaming or are working in the game industry and just like to read these old magazines for inspiration or to get a detailed view on the history of computer (gaming). For instance, if you scroll through the list of companies at the right hand side of http://populair.eu/games/ you will see that the game industry is booming. Almost any company is hiring like mad and thus the history is becoming more and more interesting.

Missing entries in the Magazine Archive of World of Spectrum

The digital archives at World of Spectrum is almost complete but misses some issues. As a giveback to their archive I decided to do a search in my own collection, and the first magazine I found (that was in their list of missing issues) was "Your Computer" from may 1986. This specific issue is actually a really interesting issue. I found company profiles in there and some awesome reviews of older software (check out my scans once they are in the archive).

However… it is not only a giveback action but I also want to try to learn some best practices in scanning in my magazines so that I can get some experience and get some idea on how to scan in ALL my magazines…

To start, they list the requirements for adding them to archive, which is interesting because I can learn something here to determine my own requirements for digitalizing my magazines. Their requirements are:

- scan each page at 970 pixels wide
- in JPG format
- upload them to the incoming archive at their FTP site

CHOICE 1: Scanning Single pages of old magazines versus spreads: I want spreads!

The archive wants to have single A4′s of magazines. However, I really really don’t like that. I will give you an example of a scan I made of one of the pages out of this magazine:

Above you see a company review of Ariolasoft) (I think their most famous game was they stole a million) (later taken over by MicroProse).

I don’t know if you agree with me but if I would scan in 2 separate A4′s instead of the page spread it would definitely (1) miss some of the feeling of the total spread. It’s not only the elements that are spread over 2 pages but while reading through a magazine in total (2) you would also miss what is supposed to be on the left and what is supposed to be on the right and (3) you might miss information that is needed in the middle e.g. not handy with maps.

Furthermore (4) scanning in spreads takes half the time of scanning in page by page… so that is a functional reason to do so.

So I will not scan it in on A4 because of these 4 reasons. I would like my total digital archives to consist of A3 pages not separate A4′s. So I hope that this archive will some day convert also to full spreads instead of their current archive, which would help me with my own collection.

CHOICE 2: Resolution of scans of older magazines: 1 magazine equals 1 cd in diskspace!

The archive requests scans of 970 pixels wide. I think that is too low for quality scans. Look at the example below:

this was scanned in with a size of 4890×3424 … so if they want it at 970 pixels wide, that means it is 1940 pixels for a full size scan. This has a direct impact on the DPI requested. To give you a feeling on what the quality is for different DPI’s:

100x100dpi (559 kilobytes)	300×300 dpi (3 megabytes)
150x150dpi (1 megabytes)

It basically means a trade-off between quality of scans versus disk space. A complete scan of this magazine is 48 page spreads. Which means at 150x150dpi about 50MB. I think this is, nowadays, acceptable. 100 magazine scans would cost you 5000MB (5 gigabytes). 100.000 magazine scans would cost 5 terabyte. Since nowadays a terabyte is cheap (70 euro) you could have 100.000 magazines for 350 euro. This is possible without a problem nowadays.

I even think that 300×300 dpi is possible, it would mean you would need 15 terabyte for 100.000 magazines. Nowadays that is probably on the border of "possible for everyone" (and soon that amount of space will fit on a usb stick).

However, since 150x150dpi is readable enough (as seen in the example) I will go for 150x150dpi.

Another reason is that 1 magazine then equals the size of 1 cd in mp3 format. So 1 CD is 50MB and 1 Magazine if 50MB. I think that is reasonable and pretty much a nice thing to state.

CHOICE 3: JPG instead of other formats??

For now I have choosen JPG, but I have todo some reading here to see IF I will in the end choose JPG as format to digitize my archive. One format I’m thinking about is an open image format (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_format), since in the long run that might be handier. Maybe PNG, maybe DjVu, maybe mkv. This specific magazine archive however requires JPG. I think that is a bad choice.

Time to scan 1 magazine

On my Brother MFC A3 scanner it took me about 1/2 hour to scan the magazine. But this was with some fiddling because it was the first time I scanned a magazine AND it included making this blogposting Just scanning one spread takes a few seconds. So I think you can count on 10 minutes per magazine or even less including some the after processing. Time will tell if this is a correct assumption.

After processing!

step 1: turn to the right!

All my scans are scanned in uhm… in a way that I have to turn them to the right to make it easier readable. It’s not completely required but it makes it much handier afterwards. So:

Maybe… my scanning software can do this automatically… but… for now I used Irfanview ‘s batch conversion capabilities. As you can see, it allows for MANY batch conversion options and I only need "Rotate to the right":

I also choose as output "JPG" (with compression level 0) and set a default output directory. Later on, I might try to use Irfanview’s command line interface so that I could do these batch operations on a large amount of images. That really might save some time. Converting these 50 pages takes about 4 seconds per page on my laptop. So that is 200 seconds in total per magazine. So the total manual action including selection is about 5 minutes.

What I noticed is that the outputted files are all 3MB while the original ones are 1MB ? Uhm… probably that is because I have to add some parameters with the JPG conversion. For now I set the converter to 90% quality of the JPG. That produces again files of 1 Mb. (Something I will have to find out in a later stage).

step 2: rename!

In my case all scans are place on a directory in the following format (so I have to rename them).

step 1 renaming – So the first thing todo is to replace "CCF01052010_"  with "YourComputer8605" (I already configured my scanner to use 5 digits for the numbering, which is handy because that is what WorldOfSpectrum also uses). Total Commander, my trusty tool, has an incredibly handy multi rename tool which let’s me do this very fast:

So now I create /magazines/YourComputer/Issue8605/Pages and put all the pages in there. But wait… I also scanned in a 2 page survery So I will also create a directory /magazines/YourComputer/Issue8605/Survery to put the survey in there. I don’t know if I should place the frontpage in the root of this directory. In my own collection i might decide to do so. Ah well… let’s do this also here.

This directory structure they use is handy enough for me to follow.

step 3: submit it!

Well… I just zipped the lot… (I was thinking to put it in a .cbz (this is a zip file but the extension makes it possible for comic book readers to read it as 1 magazine, which I might use for my own scans) (it’s probably also possible to make an online reader for this format) (probably exists somewhere).

… and ftp-ed it to the incoming directory of World of Spectrum. They probably don’t like it that it is in the form of spreads of seperate A4′s but … if they really want to they can just cut all images in half and place them as A4′s.

Want to see it?

I also uploaded it to my "ijskast" (the place where I store all kinds of things to go into the refrigerator), download it here:

http://ijskast.com/yourcomputermay1986/yourcomputer0586.zip

and travel back to these old days when everything was nice… :