“But in this case, they were being sold for about $13 an issue, which is not zero, but somewhere in the realm of manageable: About $3,000 for the lot.”
Computer Shopper ran past 800 pages an issue, on paper cheap enough to crunch in a scanner, with gutters measured in millimeters. That is why nobody scanned it. Jason Scott bought nearly 200 issues off eBay with crowdfunded money and a volunteer driving them out of Ohio. The publishers let it die in 2009, and preserving it fell to one archivist and $3,000 in donations.