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Free Playboy archive preview: A gem—but better for gawkers than info-seekers
March 21, 2009 | 7:59 am
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By David Rothman
A free Playboy archive covering "53 classic issues" issues from 1954 to 2007 is priceless for students of Americana and abounds with brilliant articles like an interview with Truman Capote.
Yes, people really do read Playboy, rather than just enjoying the buxom cover girls; and in fact in the magazine’s early days, it even serialized Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451. Thank you to those at Bondi Digital who were responsible for the wondrous sights on the Web.
Unfortunately the interface is better for gawkers than information-hunters. I’m curious whether the Playboy DVD collections are better. Might the hard-to-use online archive really be just an effort to sell DVDs? I think so. No evil there. But that’s all the more reason for Playboy to put its best Bunny’s-foot forward.
Disaster for nongawking, alas
Even on my wide 22-inch screen, the archive was fiendishly difficult to deal with for nonbrowing, nongawking purposes. Consider searches. Quote marks didn’t work as a way to limit searches to "Norman Mailer" rather than pick up articles with "Norman" or "Mailer." Did I miss out on something? What’s more, navigation is a disaster. I don’t mean to seem ungrateful; but might there a text-oriented version of the archive in the future, with links to the actual reproductions of the individual pages? The existing archive could still be kept for the gawkers.
In case the woman in the picture to the left looks familiar, yes, that’s Marilyn Monroe on the cover of the first issue (appearing in December 1953) as reproduced in Wikipedia.
The e-book angle: The Playboy archive is a classic not just in a positive way but also a negative one. The designers were more interested in emulating print than in convenience for online users. The archive serves as a magnificent negative example for people digitizing books for the Web, including the coffee-table variety.
The PC angle: Yep, questions abound about the Playboys and sexism, materialism, you name it. But I’d hope that even the most vehement-Playboy-haters would appreciate the historical and literary value of the collection.
Also of interest to the lit crowd: Michael Chabon on his Jewish heritage, in an interview with a Pennsylvania newspaper (via Tweet from Ron Charles, a Washington Post book critic).
(Big thanks to Michael Cairns at Personanondata for the Playboy link.)
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Comments:
Perhaps this site has a bad accessibility. When wieved in Windows.
But when viewed on linux, even if microsoft suggest installing novell s moonlight, it is impossible to go beyond the page suggesting silverlight.
So, there is NO accessibility for those running Linux.
Requiring Flash for basic functionallity of a web site is stupid enough. If this site requires Silverlight (or any other Flash-type plugin), then the Playboy people are even more clueless.
Companies everywhere: If you must use these types of plugins, keep it limited to videos. Don’t make your entire site dependent on it. HTML and CSS can do quite a lot of the fancy navigation and layout, and is supported in all modern browsers. Make your site too inaccessable to me (and others) and I won’t use it.
This is a microsoft-backed project to get people to install silverlight. They are scrambling to compete to with Adobe in this space, and they have a found a compelling content matter with which to wage their next battle.