Why don't you advertise THAT?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I just subscribed to Harper’s, because National Geographic and Cook’s Illustrated and Game Informer don’t really fill our whole bathroom reading month. So, the subscription is seventeen bucks or so for a year, and it mentions you get access to their online archive. Okay, sign me up.

Until I actually gave them my credit card and hit submit, they didn’t make it clear that that’s the WHOLE archive. From 1850. I can just sit around and browse a hundred and fifty years of Harper’s. (I mean, I work in a library, I have the microfilm fifty feet away, but do you have any idea what that microfilm cost us? And this huge backfile is not in our databases, and do you know what THEY cost?) WTF? Why isn’t that prominently advertised?

Anybody else find out after they bought something or while they were researching it that somebody really fell down on the marketing job?

2

That’s great.

The Chicago Public Library recently made the online historical Chicago Tribune archive (from 1849, IIRC) accessible at home, and there’s so much good stuff there.

But the reality is that most people don’t care about that. Other than fellow Dopers, that is.

And if they advertised it, some people would want a cheaper subscription without the full archive.

3

Atlantic Monthly also gives you access to a huge archive of articles online.