I subscribe to five physical mopar magazines

• Mopar Muscle
• Mopar Collectors Guide
• Mopar Action
• Mopar Magazine
• Mopar Enthusiast

Now as I’m sure you are aware, people who subscribe to magazines typically do one of a few things when they are finished with the magazine

• Throw them out/recycle them
• Pass them around to a circle of friends
• Keep specific articles from them
• Keep the entire collection for future reference

I’m a #4 kinda guy. And since i’ve been collecting magazines for a number of years I have a HUGE collection. Right now I’m trying to figure out what to do with them.

I was all excited for a while when I heard that some magazines were going to have electronic versions of their magazines available. Unfortunately those electronic versions are essentially garbage.

Why are they garbage? Because they are only available online. And who knows how long they will be available online for? If the magazine/company goes under, then all your online copies would be gone. What good is that?

And of course since they are online only, it requires a user to be online. What happens if/when your internet goes down at 2AM the night before the Nationals and you’re trying to detail your engine bay for the 50th time and you need a reference image? Sorry, you’re out of luck.

So why can’t they be stored in a searchable format such as PDF? Of course I’m sure some of the publishers will whine about piracy and whatnot, but I had an idea that might work for some people who want to keep their collection on their computer.

Of course you could scan each and every issue you get. But that would be a pain in the butt. So what about a service where you could buy old issues in PDF format?

So what if a deal were worked out with the magazine publishers where users could buy backissues for $2 in PDF format for single issues and perhaps $10-$15 for a whole year.

But in order to protect store sales and advertising sales, the PDF archives were only available for issues 6 months old or older. This would preserve newsstand sales, maintain sales and allow a secondary revenue stream.

Being a technical writer I am very familiar with the PDF format. PDF’s can have hotspots (links to websites), be fully searchable and indexable. A main index could be saved/updated once a month and made available for free to entice users to purchase the pdf issues and to give users a way to search for a specific article by title.

Of course if you had your issue(s) in a directory or on a disk you could simply search within all files, but many users aren’t aware that you can actually do that.

Might it affect physical sales? I expect not. But I would expect revenue would be increased with the ability to sell backissues cheaply and easily and completely electronically. Some people would buy the product that never bought it before simply due to cost or the fact that delivery was unreliable.

It might even increase backissue sales to some companies that want to keep issues for archival purposes.

So are there any magazine publishers reading this? If you are and if you’re interested in what this can do for you then contact me and perhaps we can work together and save my shelves from sagging under the weight of hundreds of issues.

When I heard about the potential merger between GM and Chrysler I was beside myself. I wanted to take my Challenger and burn it to the ground and send the nice folks at Cerberus the video to make them think twice about what they were doing.

Thankfully calmer heads, and a desire to keep the challenger, prevailed.

I read recently that the talks between the two have failed, here is an excert from a Reuters news report

“Merger talks between Chrysler and General Motors Corp were dropped earlier this month when GM said its near-term focus was on shoring up its own cash position.”

That’s a good thing. GM would have ripped up Chrysler, killed three quarters of it, and taken the good bits for themselves.

Could you picture a Hemi in a Corvette? Sure it might make the Corvette seem like a worthwhile car, but it would be sacrilege. Of course GM would have put the Cummins in their trucks. The Duramax is junk compared to the Cummins.

I bet Ford would love to get their hands on the Cummins to replace the PowerJoke, but lets not talk Ford/Chrysler. That would be worse.

So the talks have failed, and I’m a happy camper again. But is Chrysler? Apparently not.

Cerberus is apparenly demanding more than 7 billion dollars from Daimler over losses that have occured since the buyout. But wait, didn’t Cerberus just pay 7.4 billion for for 80.1% Chrysler? Yes they did.

Basically Cerberus is saying that Chrysler was damaged goods before they bought it and that Daimler knew it. Thus making the sale some kind of bad faith arrangement.

I doubt it will happen, but if it does then this means that Chrysler was essentially a free acquisition for Cerberus.

I could go on for hours about why Chrysler and the rest of the North American auto manufacturers are in serious trouble. But we won’t go there. Suffice it to say that Chrysler is not part of GM.

And for that, I’m happy.

It’s been a while since I updated the site, so today I upgraded to the latest and greatest version of IndexU.

There are many new features and functions and those will become apparent once I get the new theme done.

I’ll see you soon!

I haven’t been posting lately, and found this while cleaning up the hard drive. I hope you get a kick out of it.