It’s the bane of many a public librarian. The phone rings, you answer it, and then politely decline the caller’s offer to donate the last 60 years of National Georgraphic magazine to your library.
“Yes, I’m sure they’re in fine condition. Oh? Been in your mother-in-law’s house for the last 60 years huh? Yes, I know you want to help out, but we’ve got several years of it already. Yes, sir I can tell you’re happy she’s dead but we just don’t have any use for that many magazines. No, actually they’re not all that valuable – you do realize they print several hundred thousand at a time, right? Yes, so they’re not exactly rare or anything.”
Now there’s a much easier way to get every single issue of National Geographic from the last 120 years and it doesn’t involve any donations. You can buy it on its very own hard drive. That’s right, you can get every issue of National Geographic since the dawn of humankind on a 160 GB external drive. As a bonus, the collection only takes up 60 GB, so you’ve got another 100GB to do with as you please.
I wonder if that’d be enough room for every issue of Popular Mechanics…
Can’t read the text
It is difficult to read the text on the electronic version of National Geographic. You can look at the pictures fine. Here are two comments from Amazon reviews that reiterate my point.
>The default page size is too small for me to read the text, so I have to magnify it, but every time you turn the page it resets and you have to magnify it again.
>You need to turn on the digital magnifier that comes with the software or to use maximum zoom to read the texts on your monitor. Don’t expect a .pdf ASCII text resolution of the scanned pages.
So if you don’t have the National Geographic in paper you might want to keep a few of those donations so that people can actually read the articles.
In regards to the 100gb that is free they could use that room to include a readable version of the text.