Playboy Puts All Its Back Issues On An 250 Gig External Hard Drive

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First off, let me assure you that this article is absolutely safe for work, as the most objectionable thing you’ll see is a photo of the box with the ubiquitous logo on it. I’m sure that’ll leave many disappointed, but still, we must carry on. The folks out at Playboy are putting the entire contents of their back issue run onto one single 250 gig external hard drive, thus ensuring that, even in an internet outage, you will still have a supply of porn on hand.  No pun intended.

National Geographic did it first, and now Playboy’s joining in by offering up their entire print run on a hard drive, letting you see what ads for stereos and booze and whatnot have looked like over the years, not to mention what naked women have looked like over the years, which is probably why most will get in on this.

Not that you won’t get plenty of value out of such a thing,whether you’re here for an anthropological study of advertising over the years or you’re just here for hot chicks naked like large portions of the internet are, but Playboy’s going to ask you to shell out a whopping $300 for this set. And while that’s an outlandish price for a 250 gig hard drive, for a complete print run of Playboy included with it? Well, not so much.

Of course, this leads us to ask some very interesting questions about the nature of publication distribution. We already know that ebooks are big business, and considering how the iPad’s looking to work them, are we looking at the end of the dead trees publishing era? When you can offer up almost sixty years of magazines on one hard drive, where before it would have taken boxes and stacks of magazines, is there a value to be had in print? It’s a good question, and one worth watching, but I tend to think that we may well be seeing the end of paper publications.