This fall, collectors will find it surprisingly easy to buy copies of 1970s Rolling Stone magazine and 1950s Playboys — not in their highly-sought-after original forms, but in DVD sets from Bondi Media. In Rolling Stone’s case, over a thousand issues, the entire archive since the 1960s, will be released in conjunction with their 40th anniversary celebration this fall. Playboy, not quite as ambitious, will be releasing a decade at a time, starting with the 1950s this October. Both sets will retail for around $100 (Rolling Stone includes a subscription to the ink-n-paper version), following in the footsteps of The New Yorker, who published DVDs of their entire archives in 2005, and Mad Magazine, who released a DVD last year. Unfortunately, copyright issues hamper some usability in these sets, and a collector is more interested in owning an actual copy rather than a digital one, so some might consider these to be little more than an electronic coffee-table book. I, however, wish more magazines would make these available. Smaller magazines, like the D&D magazine Dragon, have released digital archives in the past, but the interest in larger, older magazines is still growing.

As a collector, you might not realize just now much research you do — who was in what magazine, who was centerfold in what year, when were your favorite records reviewed in Rolling Stone — and you might be doing some harm to your collection to refer to them on a regular basis. Playboys tended to have loose or split covers, and early Rolling Stone was on quick-yellowing newsprint, neither of which like a lot of handling. The less handling of old paper, the better, to keep it in as good shape as possible. Unless you’ve got a complete collection, you must have small holes, here and there, in your collection. To browse an issue not on your shelf, it’s off to the library to peruse a black-and-white microfiche. Having magazine archives on DVD is the best of both worlds — you’ve got a full-color, high quality microfiche, with high-tech viewer, at your disposal in your own home.

Comparing the DVDs to a microfiche is a bit too accurate, however. As noted above, without the proper releases, these DVD or CD-ROM collections cannot be completely searchable, as many researchers would prefer. The magazines are broken down into single image scans of entire pages — just as microfilm is — and assembled in slideshow fashion. Bondi seems to have the proper releases for some projects, as they claim to also be retyping the Playboy set in their press release. People accustomed to Googling for a name or phrase will be disappointed, but they should remember that having what amounts to a huge microfilm archive of their favorite magazine, in their own home, should be seen as a boon.

By releasing these sets, magazines are truly acknowledging their collectors, rather than focusing on next month’s issue and letting their history fall behind. Let’s hope more publishers follow suit, giving fans the ability to own a copy of every magazine, down to the advertisements and letters to the editor, as a supplement to the carefully stored and lovingly collected archive they’ve painstakingly acquired.