I think there's a misconception that the web archives contain the full content of all the magazines. I would estimate it's not more than 30, maybe 40% based on searching for articles I know exist. My hunch is that the website contains most articles created since magazine production went digital, probably 15 to 18 years ago depending on how cutting edge Taunton was at the time. When you do an article search on the web, pay attention to the oldest results. The don't go back to the beginning.
The videos on the web site keep the archive DVD from being an overlap of 100% of the web content. The web search is more effective as well, possibly due to the way the articles were created and stored.
The DVD contains every page of every issue right up to 12/08, ads and all. Navigation is pretty good and search is OK. I say OK because it seems you have to have a word for word match to find an article. On Google for example, you can throw a set of words at the search and it will weight results based on how many of them are there. Not so on the DVD. This makes it difficult at times to find articles you know are there, a search quickly goes from too broad to too narrow.
One other advantage the web content has is that each article is a separate pdf file. This makes for easy downloading or printing of just the article. On the archive DVD, each issue is a pdf (probably. it acts like this is the case, but I can't vouch 100% for the file format). This makes printing out a single article a bit more difficult as you have to choose the pages to print. Not too bad when the story runs on consecutive pages and there aren't too many ads embedded into or between the pages of the article.
I like the fact that the DVD installs to your hard drive, allowing you full functionality without the disc present. I love to read it on airplanes and I'm not too fond of dragging a $150 DVD around in order to do that. If you have an older laptop with a smallish hard drive, you might not care for a 3+ GB product loading itself to your hard drive. Probably time for a new laptop if that's the case, given the massive hard drives that have been standard the past few years.
On a whole I give the content a 9.5 (would be 10 if it had the web videos) and I give the search/navigation an 8. At $150 it was a no brainer to me. I travel a lot and crave good reading material, especially something that doesn't weigh 5 lbs. This will keep me smiling for a long, long time.
Jim
