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points by qingcharles 1 day ago | 0 comments
Definitely not newspapers. I would love to, but the scope creep would kill me. I estimate there are 100 million magazine issues published over the last 200 years across the world. That will keep me busy enough :)

Overdrive has a pretty limited amount of back issues for magazines, which is why I generally ignore it, except if I want to quickly read something on my Kindle.

Do you have a plan for all the data once you have it?

[–] NoMoreNicksLeft 1 day ago
I'll probably download all the magazines. They keep releasing new issues (for the few titles still printing). They claim that they only keep the back issues for the last 3 years... but all they do is make those impossible to find with their search/browse features. If one has the ids for the individual issues, they seem to have 100% retention. So I'll be able to get those... there are 4 or 5 titles I can't get current issues of otherwise.

I think your estimate of magazine issues is high, but I commend your effort. I wouldn't mind hearing about which you've managed to complete. I keep finding that I can get all the historical issues, and I can get all the recent issues, but there's this hole in the middle from about 1985 through 2005 that is usually impossible. It's irritating.

I might test if I can pull audio books down too, though those will be limited to the ones appearing in my own local library (every municipal library seems to have access to the full magazines though, if you know the magic urls).

[–] qingcharles 17 hours ago
Fire me an email (on my profile).