I just read that Playboy has put everything in its 57-year history into a searchable online database. It’s optimized for the iPad, but presumably would work just fine on a different tablet (or even on a regular old computer).
Playboy and I have never clicked. I used to read it at the bookstore where I worked when I was in college, but even then I’m not sure how seriously I took it.
I think it wants to inhabit a place that it really can’t defend. Particularly since the Web came of age—so, for perhaps the past 15 or 16 years as I type—Playboy’s pictorials are really rather quaint. I mean, if you’re crackin’ a Playboy to see naked women, you’re leading a very, very sheltered life. (You’re also going to get a warped, and dreadfully sterile, idea of what beauty is.)
Editorially, it’s always struck me as a bit haughty. When I subscribed several years ago, the consistent impression I got was that it was published for college students and middle-aged men who each wished they were the other. I still like that description. College students covet the success; middle-aged men covet the youth. And I suspect that of the people who really do live the lifestyle consistently described by the magazine, very few of them read it. A truthful name for it would be Envy.
Doubtless if Playboy is to survive, it needs successful electronic properties. I’d suggest that on this new site, they start trickling in a few online-only features and lay the groundwork for life after the physical magazine. Hef might not see the death of the paper version—he’s 85, after all—but I bet a lot of us will.
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