May I just do a very…

May I just do a very quick, very minor rant? I've been trying to find the work of the professors interviewing me today. Of the three creative writers, they have all won multiple awards and prizes -- they're clearly well-established in literary terms. But Borders couldn't get me anything quicker than 7-10 days, so I thought, no problem, I'll just poke around online, and I'm sure I can find something of theirs. Well, an hour later, I've found a total of two poems by one of the professors, and nothing from either of the others. No poetry, no short stories, no novel excerpts. Oh, plenty of listings of the many fine literary magazines who have published their work, but no actual material.

Will someone please tell me why oh why don't literary magazines don't put copies of their back issues online? I can understand that if you're primarily a print magazine that you might want to wait a year or so, to encourage actual sales. I do get that. But there must come a point at which back issues are very unlikely to sell in any significant quantity, and at that point, it would, I think, be far better for these writers and the growth of their readership if some of their work was actually available online. It can't be that hard for them to do -- they have the work in electronic format already, after all. A quick conversion to HTML, or even PDF, I'm not picky, and they'd be good to go.

If I do end up teaching in an English department with a literary magazine, and if I fail to convince them to put their back issues online, you all have permission to come and slap me upside the head for not trying hard enough.