Recently, I went searching through my set of LR&P magazines in quest for a particular article. Inevitably, I pulled several issues aside for future re-re-reading. The articles/columns/opinions are timeless and should be required reading for anyone interested in railroad preservation.

What are the chances of posting some of EleanorP on RyPN?

Zero. When he was still involved with the site, Hume Kading asked. Pentrex, which holds the copyright, politely but firmly declined.

> Pentrex, which holds the copyright, politely but firmly declined.

They don't even sell back issues, so you can't buy them from Pentrex if you want to. Yet they won't allow anyone else to reprint or republish them. Thanks a lot guys...

I beleive they DO sell back issues they still have in stock:

http://www.pentrex.com/magazines-locomotive---railway-preservation-magazine-back-issues.html

Pentrex also owned the rights to Passenger Train Journal. Somehow Mike Schafer got the rights to that magazine so he could bring it back to life.

In this day and age, that's no excuse. Pentrex is simply repeating the longtime railfan mentality of "hoarding information". That's rooted in a very broken belief: that information's value increases by exclusivity. "the fewer people that have it, the more it's worth". Maybe for stock tips and battle plans. But for most else, the fewer people know it, the more irrelevant it is. This has certainly become evident in the age of easy web search, web monetization and blogging. But I'll bet it was always true.

L&RP sits in Pentrex's vaults making them not one thin dime. It isn't like it sits there accumulating value. Every year, a bunch of eyes do not pay to see it, and that money is forfeit, left on the table. Like the railfan who hoards photos for that book he'll never write, I'm sure somebody at Pentrex has some high-falootin' notions of future schemes to make money on it. But I look at Pentrex and I see a company continuing to press a 20th century niche-market business model. The world has changed. Read "The Long Tail" for how special-interest publications fit into it, but Pentrex operates in a fairly narrow band within that long tail. Not at the left edge (Harry Potter), but slightly to the right, and in a fairly narrow band. L&RP died because it moved slightly right of the narrow band that Pentrex knows how to market to. That was fatal in 1993.

What's happened in the last 10 years is that people have become conscious of the fact that there *is* a long tail, and technology has arisen that allow successful marketing into any part of that long tail. Notably:

* Want to be conservative and stay on paper? Publish on demand by farming it out to services like [url="http://www.lulu.com"]Lulu[/url].

* Willing to go electronic, for the zero repro costs, but need ironclad copy-control? Amazon (Kindle) and several competitors have it all worked out.

* Want to jump into "free"? Use Yahoo YSM or Google AdSense to monetize. A good friend of mine, she's a fetish fashionista and has the canonical web page on the subject of vampire makeup. Guess how well THAT page is gonna do this month! She doesn't even host it herself, so she rev-shares 50/50 with someone else. Put it this way, she pays her rent with this stuff, and she's small potatoes.

The obvious answer is that there simply is not not enough money to be made in this tiny market to justify a reprint, even if electronic or on-demand.

--
Will

And, much of the information is dated - it is more of a historic record of the state of the art at its time than a source of modern practice and standards for today. I get a nice feeling of nostalgia when I review my old copies.

dave

And in the 20th century, I would agree. Read a book called The Long Tail. It talks about the way markets have totally changed in the last 10 years as a result of technology. Products once too obscure are now viable.

Look at the U.S. marketing of Japanese Anime (say "Annie Mae"). The demographics are fabulous. The major consumers are tech professionals age 18-35, early adopters, loads of disposable income they dump into entertainment. The sort that actually pays $1.99 for TV episodes on iTunes. They would be happy to pay for Anime, but it's not possible to. The only way to get most Anime is by piracy. Literally, the day after a show airs on Japanese TV, some fan has added English subtitles and pushed it up on BitTorrent. Anime studios have tried to market conventionally in the U.S., spending a fortune to master DVD box-sets of TV seasons. But by the time they arrive at Best Buy, they're 1-2 years late to market, and they just can't compete with digital distribution. And the studios won't attempt digital distribution because... well, it's not their thing. They're kinda stuck in the 20th century. Too bad, they're leaving a hell of a lot of money on the table.

With L&RP, any of us could make color scans, write a PDF and send it to LuLu. The only thing left to do is figure out how to make sure Pentrex gets their due.

Your anime comparison is flawed.

The demographics are very different. The filesharing systems (Bittorrent and friends) works for distributing anime because the young people know what filesharing is. Largely, our group is a bunch of old farts that may have never even heard about filesharing - and many of us are not inclined to learn. We are set in our ways, and pretty much want our paper magazines.

Not to mention for anime, filesharing is big because a large percentage are Unix weenies that think it is their right to share the information freely, even though just about every major city has at least one Japanese mall where they could buy the DVDs, or at least an internet store where they could order them. But I digress...

Back to the economics - who is going to pay for these magazines to be scanned? If the publisher has any respect for quality, the scans are going to have to be done professionally, with images that a printer can use to turn out a quality product, paper or digital. No magazine wants their content published with all the minor (or sometimes bigger!) flaws and shortcuts that an amateur with a cheap HP scanner will produce. Professional scanning costs money.

And what is the ultimate payoff? There just are not that many of us. In order to make a reprint sale, the publisher has to find the market, which is tiny to begin with. Advertise to spread the word. Amongst those eyes and ears realizing that now reprints are available, a good percentage of the market will not need the reprints, because the have originals anyway. Paring them off, the remainder needs to be convinced they need to spend the money on old information, when they can pick up bits and pieces of the info on the net (like RYPN). There will be a group of the remainder that will just be too cheap to lift a nickel, and then a small percentage that will freely swap the images using filesharing.

How much of that market is left? Can the publisher make money? Make enough to justify the whole project?

--
Will

Sounds like the answer here is the very old-fashioned one of various organizations having complete files of L&RP - and other related works - in a L-I-B-R-A-R-Y. I know it's not the high-tech immediacy of the work being digitized, but at least it's legal, and it just might be a way of getting people to join your museum/chapter/etc. Far, far from a perfect solution, but you don't have to get Pentrex involved to do it.

Often the individual author retains his rights to republish an article elsewhere. This maybe be a way to share without infringing on Pentrex.

It sounds like there are some issues with the old issues. :)

The content has become outdated, at least in some cases, by newer methods and technologies. I can understand that, and saw the same sort of thing, only to a larger degree, render a large quantity of model railroad magazines I'd collected over the years worthless.

Obviously there's a wealth of good historical information in the old L&RP's, but maybe some of the things are no longer as relevant as they once were.

It's also apparent that the publisher is not willing to allow them to become public domain any time soon. Maybe they're going to release then on DVD or Kindle. Or, maybe they're just going to sit on them and hope they hatch. Whatever the reason, they own the rights, and it's their right to do nothing, as much as we don't like it.

So, why not do what's been done with Passenger Train Journal? Why not start a new publication. If you can buy the naming rights from Pentrex fine, if not, then call it "Railway Preservation Magazine" or "Engine and Railroad Restoration" or "Better Tracks and Trains", whatever you and your lawyer think will fly.

Is there enough interest out there for this?

Sure, L&RP may be getting outdated, but I worry a lot less about it being outdated than, say, Popular Mechanics, BYTE or the IEEE Journal. After all, steam engines are still steam engines; trolleys are still trolleys. Not that many of us are diving into the "new stuff", be it LRVs or Chinese steam.

Now, as to Toober's message, at first I thought he was being contrary just to be contrary, but now I realize he's accurately depicting the attitude of the old-line publishers: "The customer is always wrong." They're also fond of the old chestnut: "only professionals can do quality work." I have three words in response: First and Fastest.

One thought, and one question.

First the thought (before it evaporates as so many seem to do these days)..

I would argue against the position that any of the materials should be considered outdated. Yes many techniques and processes have likely been surpassed as new materials and ideas have come into play, but at a minimum, those "old ideas" serve two important functions.

First, those techniques are part of the history and evolution of the preservation movement, L&RP besides being a wonderful resource of the time still stands as documentation of who was doing what. Secondly, those techniques also serve as markers as either alternatives to the current techniques and technologies and some of the related costs therein. Anyone involved in any of this kind of work is best suited to do his/her due diligence researching for the one best solution to their respective situtation. These "outdated" techniques serve as not only alternatives, but the information represented in L&RP usually showed the advantages/disadvantages to them, so you have a comparison basis against the "new way" of doing things.

It may be simply a matter of semantics, but important points nonetheless.

Now the question, and I have no idea of the legal ramifications therein.
Would it not be possible for someone, either as an individual or an organization, to have the full collection in their "library" and then go through each of those issues and produce either a full blown web enabled searchable list or something as simple as a sortable Excel file that would list all issues and the content ? And then offer to scan and send any interested party a copy of said article/issue ? The scan quality available in most offices both business and home would be suitable for most applications (losing the color photos), but for sharing of information this should work fine.

Obviously there is a cost involved, even if we're simply talking about an individual doing his/her part to share with the preservation community (equipment, time, electricity, internet connection, etc) I don't beleive you could charge for the article that would be a clear infringement on someone's copyrights, but could a minimal charge be put in place for the "administrative costs" ?