Comments on: Nadine Gordimer on Writing and Life

By: Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:41:36 +0000

Ah, it’s probably just the luck of the draw, Eva. Sometimes you can read for hours without hitting a paywall, and sometimes you’ll come after one subscription-required article after another. It all depends on how you pick your way through the site. For a few years we’ve been gathering permission from authors and their estates to make their work available online but, as you can imagine, it’s rather an overwhelming task to track down thousands and thousands of copyright holders. If we could snap our fingers and get permission from every one of them, then by tomorrow we’d have 99% of our archives online for free.

By: Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 04:41:36 +0000

Ah, it's probably just the luck of the draw, Eva. Sometimes you can read for hours without hitting a paywall, and sometimes you'll come after one subscription-required article after another. It all depends on how you pick your way through the site. For a few years we've been gathering permission from authors and their estates to make their work available online but, as you can imagine, it's rather an overwhelming task to track down thousands and thousands of copyright holders. If we could snap our fingers and get permission from every one of them, then by tomorrow we'd have 99% of our archives online for free.

By: Eva

Eva — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:51:56 +0000

Hi Waldo, Thanks for letting me know! I guess I took a wrong turn on the site somehow – I’ve always hit subscriber walls before. I’ll definitely be back to browse around some more.

By: Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 13:04:14 +0000

Digging through the (sadly pretty limited) online archives of the excellent Virginia Quarterly Review recently, I came across this interview with South African author (and Nobel Prize winner) Nadine Gordimer.

We’ve got every article we’ve ever published since 1975, and a smattering going clear back to our founding 1925. Of the 4,007 articles that comprise that collection, 2,112 are available in their entirety to non-subscribers, more than half. You’ll find few comparable publications that provide so great a portion of their archives under such terms. That’s really not particularly limited.

By: Eva

Eva — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:51:56 +0000

Hi Waldo, Thanks for letting me know! I guess I took a wrong turn on the site somehow – I've always hit subscriber walls before. I'll definitely be back to browse around some more.

By: Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 05:04:14 +0000

Digging through the (sadly pretty limited) online archives of the excellent Virginia Quarterly Review recently, I came across this interview with South African author (and Nobel Prize winner) Nadine Gordimer.

We've got every article we've ever published since 1975, and a smattering going clear back to our founding 1925. Of the 4,007 articles that comprise that collection, 2,112 are available in their entirety to non-subscribers, more than half. You'll find few comparable publications that provide so great a portion of their archives under such terms. That's really not particularly limited.