Good Old Boat Digital Editions

Reviewed by Paul M. Clayton

Nobody I know has room on the boat for a few dozen magazines, and the darned things just get mildewy if you keep them on the boat anyway. What most people do have room for these days is a computer. It's not unusual for a modern computer to have a terabyte of data storage available, so why not carry your books and magazines in digital format?

The people at Good Old Boat magazine are helping to make this concept into a reality. They offer one-year (six issue) magazine sets in digital format for $19.95 a year, covering all the years from 1998 through 2009. They also offer single issues for $8.00 apiece - no, I don't know why anyone would buy a single issue for $8.00 instead of springing the double sawbuck for the whole year.

Since I am already on a massive paper reduction campaign, I decided to give the Good Old Boat download a try. I ordered the 2009 set, and immediately on payment was redirected to another screen where I was able to download a zip file with 233 megs of pdf files in it. Not so many years ago a download like that would have meant starting it around dinner time and hoping and praying that the connection didn't die before it finished sometime in the wee hours of the morning. Nowadays even "DSL Lite" makes child's play out of a 233 meg download. It took about a half hour for my slow system to slurp it up.

I burned the files onto a cd that I could carry around, so that means I have a backup in case of hard drive failure, as well as a portable copy that fits right in the cd drive in my machine at work. That means while I'm waiting for some interminable report to run, I can flip through the 2009 edition of Good Old Boat magazine. To me, that's miles ahead of hanging around the water cooler talking about football. And best of all, I can carry my copy with me when I go down to the marina, without cluttering up the boat.