The Gauntlet is Thrown. Harper’s Makes All of Their Past Content Available for Free to Subscribers

Uh oh. Oh no you didn’t! Harper’s has gone and “done it”, granting access to 157 years of Harper’s Magazine content as part of their normal subscription price. Take that New Yorker! Infowhores unite!

(click the image for a larger look at what it looks like when you sign up and have access to 157 years of material)

Seriously though, Harper’s has just shown the rest of the world what magazine publishers and newspapers should have been doing all along, opening up digital archives to subscribers and clearly delineating what they consititute as fair use for the people who will want to use them in their work, etc.

This page at the new Harper’s site is a model of plain speaking and openness which others should strive for. I’ve extracted the key bits I found illuminating (since it was fair for me to do so):

Blogging Harper’s (or Not)

Linking. This site was built first as a service for our subscribers. In the future we will look for a solution for bloggers wishing to link to older Harper’s content. For now, we’ll continue to publish to the web such free content as Washington Babylon, the Harper’s Index, the Weekly Review, and full-text selections from the magazine.

Copyright. Copyright law is deeply flawed and can be criminally abused, but we count on it to survive. We support fair use and encourage you to liberally quote passages of a few paragraphs (and please link when you do so). But please don’t post our PDFs, page images, or full text articles to other sites.

And this invites others to provide feedback and help them work the kinks out:

The site has been tested in several browsers but not with the thoroughness that many thousands of visitors will bring to the task. We’d appreciate hearing about usability flaws, CSS problems, and other issues. Similarly, we’d like to hear about any misaligned page scans in the archive, or pages where the content does not match up with the title/link.

Bravo Harper’s! I just subscribed as a show of support. I look forward to browing the archive in more depth this weekend.

What do y’all think? Will the other mags follow this lead?