How do I create a digital archive of a print magazine in 2021?
February 24, 2021 12:11 PM   Subscribe

What is the current state-of-the-art for creating (and potentially hosting) a searchable, browsable digital archive of a defunct print magazine? Is there automated OCR software? Is there open source software for creating flipbooks out of hundreds of folders of images/PDFs?

My organization will soon be in possession of high-quality scans of the entire print run of a lifestyle magazine (we own the copyrights). Right now my directive is to get some kind of digital archive of the magazine online that is "searchable by google." There's a distant possibility that we could partner with the Internet Archive to do this, but I think making the issues *that* public will be a tough sell. I am aware of the Internet Archive's open source flipbook software should we end up trying to host this ourselves.

My question is, what are the current best options for doing something like this (ideally the ones that don't involve me manually running OCR software on every scanned page or coding up a distinct flipbook instance for each issue)?

Do you have experience with any companies or services that might perform these tasks--even if that means paying them a monthly fee to host the archive?
posted by EL-O-ESS to Computers & Internet (4 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
If you already have the scans, then it's question of... do you WANT TO manage your readers? And how much content would you be offering?

If you don't give a hoot on who reads your content, then just host the PDF files somewhere, even one of the free hosts. But if you want it to be searchable, you have to create a ton of text and metadata for that. I am not aware of anything automated that will do it for you, parse out the articles, and somehow make those automagically searchable by Google.

Reading platforms like ISSUU, Flipbook, and such are not really for offering back issues, but new publications, from what I can see.

In unrelated news, Google did try to court magazine subscribers back in 2012 with "Play Magazines" but it was discontinued in 2020.
posted by kschang at 12:31 PM on February 24, 2021 [2 favorites]


The folks at ibiblio.org might give you raw hosting space, but you would need to maintain whatever platform serves the content -- and that's one thing that IA does really well.

How to share content, and their criteria: https://www.ibiblio.org/share/
posted by wenestvedt at 12:47 PM on February 24, 2021 [1 favorite]


I don't know pricing or any other details, but my work uses 3D Issue to turn our print magazine into an online flipbook. You can see it in action here.
posted by tacodave at 5:06 PM on February 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


I am not an expert, but I can tell you from archiving my own personal collection of playbills and music festival programs:

Abbyy FineReader does quite good OCR, and does a really good job of automatically splitting pages if you want it to do that. It's VERY easy to point it at a folder full of images (assuming you have a folder of images for each issue) and then spit out a PDF when you're done. (You can ALSO spit out an HTML page and an epub and a bunch of other formats if you want.)

FineReader can work with Apple's Automator, so you can build somewhat automated OCR workflows.

I hadn't bought OCR software for many years (because I'm a cheapskate frugal), but I have been really happy with my Abbyy FineReader purchase.

Personally, I prefer PDFs to online flipbooks, but if you really want an online flipbook, I just checked out FlowPaper for a client of mine, and I'm pretty impressed. (I like them MUCH better than Issuu.) The free trial version of FlowPaper lets you create a 10 page document from a PDF and host it on either their site or your own; going through that process gave me a very clear idea of how it works and let me recommend it to my client.

As I said, I am not an expert on this, but I do deal with related issues from time to time for my clients, so feel free to send me MeMail if you wish.
posted by kristi at 7:10 PM on February 27, 2021 [2 favorites]


« Older Help my friend understand assisted living care, in...   |   Need a crow-proof robin nesting box Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.