Others say...

"Great idea, terrible execution. Bondi's crippling DRM ruins what could have been a great collection."
There are quite a few rave reviews here and, for many, they will be spot on. I'd like to target my review to a more technically discerning audience interested in the technical specifications. Many will not mind the faults I list below and that's totally fine. It's great to enjoy this set as a fun retrospective of classic Americana, but I feel the need to point out some egregious shortcomings for those that care.

First of all, Bondi claims they're doing us a favor by tethering their content in a stupid digital rights management scheme. It's so that we can enjoy the content with greater ease. To many, it will be a headache. Not that their image viewer is awful. It's just excruciatingly slow compared to looking at the same images in, say, a PDF viewer like Acrobat. The interface is slow, sluggish, and unresponsive. I'm often required to click buttons more than once while waiting for the application to respond. It really makes reading a chore. With most PDF viewers, you can move between pages rapidly. With Bondi's system, you must load one (or two) pages at a time. I tested on a Mac Pro with a great graphics card. It sure wasn't my machine that was slowing things down!

While the articles are indexed and although it IS handy for jumping around, so are PDFs!!! Why not just give the users PDF files and let them use which ever free and available apps they want? It makes absolutely no sense except as a DRM mechanism. Bondi has drastically reduced the functionality of this collection - a shame. It also guarantees a limited life to the files. If they were jpgs, pngs, or PDFs, we could always keep them current, changing the formats and the technology advances. However, the images are locked away in a proprietary file format.

The installation is quick and fairly painless. It did automatically create a shortcut on my desktop without asking my permission (annoying), but I suppose that's easy enough to delete. I haven't tried installing on multiple machines, but since no software registration is required, I'm assuming you can install multiple copies. As the software agreement reminds us, this is a violation of copyright, so don't do it - but you probably can anyway.

Oh yes - and Bondi assures us that software updates maintain compatibility. The fine print indicates that "additional fees may apply". They might provide the updates for free, but then again, they might just make users keep paying for something they supposedly already bought.

Now onto the scans. Well, they're scans of about the same quality as anyone with a regular scanner could do. I was pretty shocked to find that many of the pages are not exactly level. As we all know, it's tough to make perfectly level copies from bound print matter, but I assumed for $100, Bondi would do a better job than this. The image quality is nothing amazing. Once you blow the pages up to a readable size, the quality is noticeably diminished.

Their browser gives you the option of zooming up to 300%, but at that size, the text looks awful. The 300% option really only works for the centerfolds. They seem to be scanned at a much higher resolution than the rest of the magazine. To be fair, the centerfold images do look great - great color, great resolution, good amount of detail, etc. I think it's a bit sneaky to drop the resolution for the rest of the content though.

The whole idea is so great that it's a shame Bondi Digital Publishing screwed it up so bad. The first mistake is the crippling DRM. The second is the silly interface. The third is the inherently limited lifespan due to the DRM and interface. The fourth is the surprisingly low quality of the images.

Early Playboy is good clean (well, maybe PG-13) fun and it's a great idea to give a new generation access to this piece of American history. I'm not against the idea at all - it's a great one. I just think the realization of the idea fails on so many levels. If you don't mind the issues I raised above, you'll probably enjoy this. If you're on the fence, all I can say is, I hope you find it cheap. I don't think it's even worth Amazon's current price of $41. Shame on you, Bondi.

"a ton of innocence"
What is most striking about this is the straining to define and embody a hipness appropriate for the Fifties. Some of it is naive, some of it is silly, some of it is poignant in the way looking at old high school photos is. I'm a writer, and sometimes I set things in period and magazines like this, ROLLING STONE and THE NEW YORKER are valuable on DVD because they give vivid impressions of what people in the middle of those periods thought. (I wish the Sixties set were out. I'm writing a play set in the Sixties and ROLLING STONE covers only a few bands of the spectrum, and of course THE NEW YORKER's perspective has its own limitations.) On a personal level, it's fun to see people I know in New York today as wizened sages of the literary and journalistic world back when they were eager kids.

"Excellent"

Ditto to the last review. I received this as a Christmas gift from my wife, and I could not be more pleased. While I have never completely subscribed to the Playboy Philosophy, its fasinating to see its evolution from the beginning and to be able to get a "real time" perspective of 50's culture from that vantage point.

"Excellent resource for pop culture articles and essays"
Excellent resource for photos, stories and essays. The search function is brilliant! - finds text in all article plus the advertisements too. Built for a Mac too.

"Playboy Saves To Your Hard Drive!"
I bought Playboy The 50's after how impressed I was with the functionality of Rolling Stone The First 40 Years. I was as equally impressed with Playboy as soon as I installed it. The content is stored on just one disc and very easy to navigate once it loads onto your computer. A convenient feature of the software in particular is how you can view the pages of the magazine. The flip mode allows you to read each issue like a magazine, with two pages displayed. The read mode zooms in on a particular page so it is a lot easier to read. The best feature however is that you can save the disc to your hard drive and never use the disc again!!