Preservation is one of the central problems of current copyright terms. By the time the term exhausts--in the U.S., now around 95 years for works for hire or life plus 75 years for author's works--the work may be completely lost. In my opinion, this will only get worse as we progress into the digital era. At least with physical copies, there is some chance an instance of the work might survive the needed gulf of time.
This is already happening in the magazine space that I'm active in. There are some magazines that appear to be completely lost. Especially first issues that were low print runs.
Edit: Just to add.. some entire runs of magazines are being destroyed: nudist magazines from the 50s-80s are almost entirely being burned, because while they are legal, they exist on a borderline that can easily imprison someone. I know of one library that has hoarded 14,000 issues and scanned every one of them but does not allow access since the optics on such magazines is so maligned.
One has to believe that, before electronic formats became common, there were a ton of niche hobbyist and other magazines that never made their way into a library, mostly ended up in the trash because the owners didn't want to move them to a new house, and no one has bothered to digitize them and upload them--especially as they're probably technically violating someone's copyright.
I know I have copies of some niche things that aren't online anywhere as far as I know--and, absent digitization and upload--will presumably fade from existence at some point.
Yeah, just one quick look on Craigslist and you will see dozens of people throwing out thousands of magazines for free just to get someone to lift them.
If I had the space I would take every one of them, but I don't right now. Maybe in a few months. I'm going to start trying to raise capital to take them all and scan all the missing ones. Most magazines in existence are now copyright orphans.
> Yeah, just one quick look on Craigslist and you will see dozens of people throwing out thousands of magazines for free just to get someone to lift them.
The question would be how many of those are magazines which need preserving. You'd be wasting your time scanning old issues of National Geographic, for instance; there are already comprehensive archives of those.
Unfortunately a lot of the comprehensive archives are not readily accessible. Even with National Geographic, there are a lot of complaints about the current complete set having really janky software. An older set I have would require me messing around with VMs and an old version of Windows. (I got it at a library book sale and never got it working.)
There are a number of magazines I would pay for the archives and they may well exist but I can't access them anywhere.
There are absolute huge numbers of very tiny run magazines that simply no longer exist in any form, and the people who even knew about them may be old or dead.
Think "college-adjacent" run off the mimeograph machine late at night kind of thing. They could have run for 4 years or more, and basically be forgotten.
Now and then you hear of a famous author's work being rediscovered in one, from something they wrote in college for one of those magazines.
