Yeah, the owners of the rights to the mags - or someone connected to the publication in some way - would have say on it staying up in my opinion as well.

OoPA is completely dedicated to working with the property owners - we were able to swing an agreement early on with one of the biggest magazine publishers in the world, based in the UK, early on. That is why the issues on that site are UK oriented.

Most U.S. based IP owners were more interested in attempting to sell the digital copies instead of giving them away for free. Even if it ended up being a futile effort.

From what I understand, when Gamefan 1-3 went up on their Shopify store, the value of those issues on eBay dropped by 40 to 75% for a period of time. Then after about six months, the value of physical copies of those issues rebounded, like I figured they would when a large number of people are able to check out the contents cheaply - they usually become interested in owning the physical copies.

I believe this effect happened with a lot of Marvel back issues when Marvel Unlimited launched - values dropped like a rock for a period of time then rebounded to all time highs.

I never had the patience to scan in magazines like Meppi does. He has been known to rescan a few times to get it just right and then patch, stitch, correct for hours on end. Mad respect for the man, I just cannot even come close to his shadow in that regard.

You would be surprised at how few people there are willing to even do a cursory scan of magazines. Last I checked out Retromags, or any site other than OoPA, earlier this year, they were still working on scans from a guy from the early 2000's who went on a mad scanning fest and gave permission to anyone that wanted to fix his scans.

Some of that is because most of these older magazines simply are no longer available (if they are, they certainly are not on eBay). There just are no physical copies available to scan to produce better scans.

The few people willing to make new scans usually end up getting the bug in their ear that they can start their own site for these and then hit the burn out wall. Scanning mags is a slow and tedious process, as you know. Editing is even slower and more tedious.