Fiction

My best example is Life Magazine.

I used to read old Life Magazines, when I discovered that the University I was attending (this is nearly 30 years ago now) had all the bound issues back to Volume 1, Number 1. I'm sure you all know that Life Magazine started publishing in 1936.

I had the enormous pleasure of reading that periodical sequentially, over a period of several years. It's as if I remember the late 1930's and early 1940's, and I could probably put you to sleep as I go on and on about what I learned, both from the articles and from the advertizing.

A couple of years ago, on DU, I was lamenting not being able to continue reading Life, and someone, very helpfully, pointed me to the website where all the old Life's were available, having been digitally scanned. Great! I thought. Then I went to the website.

Have you ever actually held an old Life in your hands? It was a large format, about 10x14. Which is noticeably larger, and considerably different from the format of your typical computer screen. But most notably, many of the photographs -- and Life was a WONDERFUL magazine for the photographs -- spanned two pages. So that means, in the digital format, you can look at a compressed version, one page at a time. So you can see one half of a photo, then the other half. It is really, really, not remotely like the original magazine. It's an example of why digital stuff is at least sometimes vastly inferior to the original.

Yes, there is a downside.