One of my major problems with the publishing industries, and the content industries in general, is a refusal to fully leverage nostalgia.

If you own a newspaper, or magazine, or network, you have history.  And if you’re going to continue fighting tooth and nail for longer, stronger copyright, the very least you can do is try to make money off that history.  Sell the past to the people who fetishize it.  Reprint old (very old, not 6 months old) issues of your magazine on demand, at a premium.  Sell people the newspaper as published on their birth date, if they want it.  Sell a copy of your entire publication’s history, because digital storage is cheap, and because you already paid for that content long ago.

What’s the downside?  If you have an archive, you’ll never sell it.  Will people stop buying magazines or books or newspapers if they never go out of print?  Of course not, because at the end of the day, making copies of anything is easier than it has ever been.  And while physical copies will always have cost, tapping into nostalgia makes it very simple to offload that cost, plus a small profit, on to your consumers.

Whenever anything goes out of print, some money is left on the table.  Whether it’s a lot of money is meaningless, because you can store the information so cheaply that any profit has value.

Periodical content is often seen as having a short shelf-life, but that’s inaccurate.  Content depreciates in value quickly, then slowly accumulates value over time.  An article, or radio broadcast, or news program that was minorly entertaining 20 years ago is now interesting specifically because it was average 20 years ago.

Stop leaving money on the table, as carve every last sliver of value out of your archive.  Make it searchable, sharable, make it alive.

Sell the past, secure your future.