Michaelangelo Matos at The Daily on the digitized second life of various ‘zines (including Smash Hits).

A few years ago, it looked like the DVD-ROM was going to be the last refuge of old archives, when venerable titles such as Rolling Stone and Playboy put their catalogs out as a series of discs, housed in DVD-style cases. But the increasing presence of “cloud” data holding is turning public storage into the go-to for private and public collectors alike. And as the price continues to plummet on scanners and image resolution continues its march to eerie infra-humanness, it’s easier to preserve magazines in their entirety for public display — and more reassuring to look at something obviously touched by human hands, on devices that ideally have not — than ever.