Byte magazines: 1976 - 1986

Re: "I wouldn't scan (especially post!) them as JPEG images. I'd suggest that you do this the way that Al Kossow does with Bitsavers docs - scan as a 1bpp TIFF" I absolutely disagree with this. These are not product manuals. They are magazines. Much of the interest is in the advertisements. Photos in the magazine are in color. I've been doing a lot of exactly this type of work (40,000+ pages worth) and the right way to do it is to create an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, but the scans should, in my opinion, be color JPEGs for pages with color, and 256 shades of gray grayscale for pages that have no color at all. All scanned at 300 dpi, unless there is a specific reason to scan at a higher resolution. As to the original post, I don't think it's inherently wrong to destroy the magazines for scanning, and they are not all that rare, but neither are they all that commonplace (I have a complete set from the first issue to sometime in the mid 1980's). As to copyrights, they are copyrighted, the copyrights are still valid, the owner (McGraw Hill) still exists and might or might not object (much depends on what is done with them). However, the most likely outcome even if they do object is that they send you a letter asking you to take them down and cease distribution. I can't imagine an actual action against anyone who complies with such a request. By the way, if you do scan them, I'd like very much to have them. -Barry Watzman