Armchair Theorist

No, this is not an April Fools joke.

In a classic case of technology being deployed to do the right thing, BONDI Digital, in conjunction with Vertigo, launched Playboy Archive earlier this month.

Playboy Archive is currently made available to the public for free, and offers 53 selected back issues of Playboy magazine for users to browse, search, and read online in a pixel-perfect rendition delivered through BONDI’s Microsoft Silverlight-based web reader. All the pages for each magazine issue are there – articles, smut, ads, everything.

The BONDI reader includes full-text search, Silverlight Deep Zoom, cross-referenced table of contents, text highlighting, and all sorts of other bells and whistles.

Come this summer, BONDI has plans to deliver other iconic magazines like Rolling Stone over the web to the public using the same Silverlight reader technology.

Check it out!

www.playboyarchive.com

(You will need Silverlight installed in order to view this. You can get Silverlight here.)

This is what you first see when you type in the URL www.playboyarchive.com

Move your mouse around to browse through the old Playboy issues and click on the one you want.

Scroll your mouse around to navigate throughout the magazine. Breadcrumbs and quicklinks can help you navigate around. You can use Silverlight Deep Zoom technology to zoom in to any page as much as you want!

Full-text search for all magazine pages, including ads. Search terms are automatically highlighted in yellow. Text search is a must-have feature, because we all read Playboy for its textual content, don't we?

If you liked this, make sure to also check out Hard Rock Memorabilia. Built by the same guys who coded Playboy Archive (Vertigo), Hard Rock Memorabilia is an online virtual museum for – no surprise here – memorabilia from Hard Rock Cafe. Hint: After the Hard Rock page finishes loading, press ‘v’ and slowly zoom out from there!