Annals of cumbersome

February 23, 2020 1:53 PM

I often can't read archived New Yorker articles because they are scanned onto the website in such a way that it's just impossible to see the text clearly. Is there a better way?

I do subscribe, so that's not the issue. I'm signed in.
Whenever I find the article, it's a badly scanned copy of the magazine itself, not a link or pdf. I can not zoom in and see the text from my macbook; clicking or using the trackpad, or trying to zoom from "view", leaves it absolutely blurry, or focused on a small corner of the page and then freezing, etc.
Is there a hack to this? Thanks.

posted by nantucket to Writing & Language (4 answers total)

Best answer: I am logged into the site right now (in Safari 13) and looking at an article from a 1925 issue. I can double-click the page to zoom in. I can't zoom in further (it's double-click to zoom in, double-click again to zoom out) but the text is large, crisp, and readable. What OS version and browser are you using?
posted by bcwinters at 3:36 PM on February 23, 2020

At least my library---maybe not your own---has disposed of microfiche and bound hard copies in cases where the issues are available (!) on the internet. Hope your library is different.
posted by tmdonahue at 4:24 PM on February 23, 2020

Response by poster: I hadn't even thought of using Safari instead of Chrome but it did the trick :)
posted by nantucket at 8:18 PM on February 23, 2020 [1 favorite]

I seem to remember that older articles are only available as scans of the printed page, because they have no digital rights to them. (When they started the iPad edition there was some discussion about whether hosting a scan is sufficient to take care of the "no digital rights" problem.)
posted by phliar at 4:43 PM on February 24, 2020