What do you guys think about a boxing magazine database similar to newspaperarchive.com where for a monthly fee you could go and research old boxing magazines like Ring, Boxing Illustrated, Boxing Monthly, FightBeat, La Boxe et Les Boxeurs, etc etc?
Is this a new business idea of yours? I buy a subscription. Might as well throw in the Police gazette and the old Boxing Blade Magazines too.
Yeah, I agree, Im not limiting it to the ones I stated above. Boxing Blade, Police Gazette (I have all of them up to 1906), La Vie an Grande, Le Auto, TV Boxing, Boxing Digest, Boxing Update, etc etc.
I subscribe to the ring atm as of last month. But the best we have for easily accessible past issues at the moment is the ranking archive on boxrec. I'd love to be able to access old magazines. However the ring offer a current service like that so it'd have to be well planned to compete, plus copyright laws etc could be an issue.
Great idea..... especially for those like me outside of US, Canada, Europe, etc........we don´t have any good boxing magazines to read.....we don´t have easy access to those kind of things....
i'm all for it. ring should have done this a few years back. i had an online subscription with the new york times and looked up old articles about classic fights. i actually have all the articles the ny times reported on for all heavyweight title fights, from sullivan-mccaffrey to klitschko-haye. pretty interesting reading.
For a yearly fee, hell yes i'd join. I think that if it were done with ads as well it would be good, but i doubt there'd be great traffic generation.
A couple of years ago I e-mailed this type of idea to Nigel Collins. I said for everyone who buys a subscription they could get database access to all the past issues. I told him he would get alot of action and it would jumpstart the magazine hardcopy again. I never heard back from him. I would love to be able to see back issues of these mags. Scartissue
Collins is a very narrow minded, egotistical man. He should have been replaced years and YEARS ago by someone who actually cares about making that magazine worthy of its namesake. Dont accept any good ideas to come out of his office or to be accepted by his office.
I think the most difficult part would be the scanning. I dont believe there is any easy way to get a decent quality scan of a magazine. The time involved is probably the reason why it hasnt been done.