View as PDF not working

Hi Martin

I can understand why there may be commercial (and possibly legal) arguments for having removed the PDFs, but until you include a comprehensive contents listing for every issue - with links through to the actual content - the archive will even more frustrating to use than it already was (if usable at all, in terms of being able to idly browse through it), because the reduced-size images of the contents pages are utterly illegible, so there's no way of knowing what's actually in any given issue.

"Search-driven" access is ok if you're looking for something specific, but very often people aren't. Indeed, there seems little point having the images there at all now, except as a deeply frustrating 'tease' :-(

And not being able to see old adverts, photos, etc, signficantly reduces the interest of the archive, for me at least.

Plus, of course, since you'll still have all the words as text - and in an easy copyable format - you're still stuck with the issue of unscrupulous people being able to infringe copyright, even if images are safe(r).

And whilst I suspect you won't be able to say anything, I'd be very intrigued to know in what way the PDFs were being abused, given that there are tens of thousands of commercial websites out there - magazine-style and otherwise - with words and images that are, presumably, open to similar (and, indeed, very much easier) abuse than a lot of page images embedded in individual PDF files, but which seem to manage.  

(Incidentally, I realise that 86 years or so of a monthly magazine is a lot of IP compared with a website that may only have been going 10 years or so, but the principle remains the same for any publication.)

Best rgds

Jon

Very bad news. Some of us got rid of our paper copies when the PDFs came along, and you are as well aware as the rest of us that the OCR'ed text is so inaccurate as to be unusable in most cases. Wouldn't it have been possible just to add a "request take-down" button for aggrieved copyright-holders? (And how does leaving the (OCR'ed) text online address the possible concerns about authors' copyright that you mentioned?) As an earlier poster said, vast numbers of journals and magazines have digitized their archives, many of them even charging for access. For examples of consumer magazines with complete colour scans, check out http://books.google.co.uk/books/magazines/language/en?hl=en . There must be a better way for Gramophone to deal with this issue. I hope that you will urgently reconsider this action.

In the meantime, you will surely wish to remove the claims all over the site that as a member, "you will be able to read original pages as PDFs".

This is really bad news and reduces even further the value of the Archive.  Quite often the OCR'd text omits whole sections of the review, for no apparent reason.  I only discovered this when downloading the PDFs to clarify some piece of gobbledegook in the text.  Now that option is no longer available.  Very, very frustrating.  And it's not practical to report every mistake.  There are so many of them that it would be a full-time job. 

I absolutely understand, and there are various forms of presenting the magazine online that we are now exploring. But we had to act swiftly to address a copyright concern, hence, sadly, the removal of the PDF function before we'd had time to develop an alternative.

Good mornig, sir.

Bad news, because I throw to the bin my twenty years old issues of Gramophone!

And what a mess, because the size of the images of the contents pages are illegible, and the OCR'ed text is so inaccurate as to be unusable in most cases.
Your decision signficantly reduces the interest of the archive (to a minimun), so I hope that you will urgently reconsider this action. I beg you.
Thanks for you time.

Sorry about that, yes, we probably should have posted a message about it, though hopefully it's been discussed in the forum sufficiently that most people will now be aware of what's happened and why.

Unfortunately not, the problem isn't us infringing the copyright (we'd
paid the copyright holders for our usage), it's people taking the
images and using them elsewhere.

I'd love to think we lived in a world where a stern warning would stop people behaving badly, but I'm not sure the web's history of piracy and illegal file-sharing suggests we do. But thank you for the response, and we are working out what to do next with regards to the way the Archive is presented.

The watermark is a happy idea, don't you think?