31 discs, so little time

I'm still loving the Complete New Yorker DVD set Ereck gave me last month, especially now that I have followed the directions on this Web site and copied all the files from the DVDs to a hard drive. The reading and the surfing are that much more fun without all the tedious swapping of discs.

I bought an external hard drive for the purpose, and there was plenty of room left on it after I installed the New Yorker files. (You actually can now buy the set preinstalled on an external hard drive, which is genius, but much more expensive.) So my eye lit on another trove of mine: the Complete National Geographic on 31 CDs, which come stored in a handsome wooden box. My folks gave me the set this some years back, and I must confess that when I got it, I fooled around with it a little, then put it on a shelf. Why? If the eight DVDs of the New Yorker set are a hassle, the 31 CDs of the National Geographic set -- which contain every issue of the magazine from 1888 to 1997, but none of those celebrated pull-out maps -- are, well, a bigger hassle.

But I had a Saturday afternoon free recently, so I copied the 31 discs to the hard drive. The designers of the National Geographic software really expected people to run the program using the CDs, so it took a bit of jiggering to make everything work from the hard drive. I won't bore you with the details of the jiggering, except to say that I had to dust off some old MS-DOS skills along with the National Geographic discs.

Finally I got everything working, and I must say: from the standpoint of presentation alone, the Geographic set is a disappointment. For starters, the program window is permanently sized at 640 by 480 pixels, which probably seemed like a great idea in 1998 but is downright microscopic by the standards of today's displays. And the program's design is, well, ugly.


Worse than that, though, is the fact that the scans of the pages are really quite poor -- smudgy, fuzzy, pixelated. Here's a sample:


By way of comparison, here's what the text from the New Yorker DVDs looks like -- still a little pixelated, but much clearer than the Geographic copy.


That said, the National Geographic set is endlessly fascinating. The text is readable, if just barely -- really, just barely -- but for these purposes, that's okay. The browsing is great, and as we all know, the photographs are striking (if blurry, in this case). Look at this one of the country singer Webb Pierce from the 1978 article about Nashville I excerpted above.