Complete New Yorker (DVD)

Complete New Yorker (DVD).
(Also from Amazon (even cheaper).)

Being European, I'm not really familiar with The New Yorker. It seems to have a very vague definition, it's not clear what it's about. But it may be good.

In any case, it's an interesting comment on pricing: I've seen 80-page ebooks sold for $49. And here you can get fifty years of publishing, 4,000 issues, on eight DVDs, for twenty dollars!! Holy crap. A whole summer's reading (at least) for twenny bucks, dang.
(If it were me, I'd have priced this at $49, but that's another matter.)

(It's even Mac compatible. You can't say that about the Doonesbury DVD which came with a collection years ago. I wrote about it to Trudeau, and he said he's lost the battle about that with the publisher, despite him having eight Macs in the house and being the author.)

I imagine it's only pure scans of the pages, as graphic files (JPG for example), not converted to actual text PDFs, because that's a very big job. And so I hope the resolution of the images is high enough for them to be easily readable.
(You can get the collection on a hard drive too, a good idea, although it's much more expensive at $179.)

Oh, has anybody tried this? Do you know if it will work if you copy it to disk (it may not, due to copyright protection)? My MacBook Air would be the logical way to read this, but it does not have an internal DVD drive.

Update: typically, it seems copyright fears once again cripple a good product. An Amazon reader writes: "I've been a New Yorker fan for a while (I usually read my parents' old copies when they're done) so I thought it would be interesting to own the set for myself. I understand that the Complete New Yorker is available on an external hard drive, and this might be a good option, but I purchased the 8 DVD package, and found it to be pretty hopeless in its design and execution. For starters, the DVDs do not use a standard reader (like Adobe, say) and come with one of their own. The installation process is unwieldy and ridiculous, and the reader itself is riddled with bugs (I haven't yet been able to access any of the content). In addition to this, under the terms and conditions, the user must agree to a spyware-like program, giving permission for web browsing information to be logged, and personal information sold on to third parties. The Complete New Yorker is a good idea, for sure, but this set is pathetic."

I can believe it. Every time I have acquired something with a proprietary reader/viewer app, it has always stunk on ice. It's very difficult, it seems, to make good software like that.
While it has positive reviews for the content, many complain about the software:
"Others have complained about the search feature, which honestly I might have done without for my purposes. But that I am unable even to read the magazine in a lot of cases because of inept software development is a huge disappointment.
And let's not forget that the program uses spyware to collect personal information and share it with third parties.
Wow. What a terrible product. I implore you not to buy."

What a pity!
Anyway, I'm now finding evidence that the original price was much higher. Perhaps the twenty dollars is a special dumping price because it got all those bad reviews? Or even that they are preparing a new and hopefully better edition? (I'm sure it's too much to ask for that it will be simple PDF pages or such. Oh, the fears about copyright.)