Journalist John DeFore, writing about himself in the third person in the Austin American-Statesman, reports on the troubles he encountered while using The Complete New Yorker.

He loaded the program on his computer and began to browse through some of the most brilliant prose ever hawked at a newsstand. A few minutes later, he was having problems. An hour later, reality set in. Mr. DeFore decided to stop trying to sound like a "Talk of the Town" column and start doing what he does best: find fault.

He finds the search function especially trying. Still, he concludes,

The flubs above were assembled not over weeks of nitpicky research, but in three hours of casual browsing. That brief survey also revealed an array of annoying user-interface features (too many big and small ones to list here) of the sort you'd expect from bargain-bin software.

Still, I won't be letting go of "The Complete New Yorker" any time soon, and I might have purchased a copy even after discovering these flaws. At $100 retail (and a whole lot less through some vendors), the set costs under two and a half cents per issue. Eight cents for each macabre Charles Addams cartoon. Less than a buck per Dorothy Parker entry, and under a quarter per Pauline Kael essay. The whole review.

An emdashes reader recently tipped me off to this series of Complete New Yorker posts at Hooptyrides—which features some fantastic screen grabs and excerpts—about one user's DVD disgruntlements, some of which overlap with DeFore's. It's reassuring to know, after corresponding with New Yorker warrior archangel and Head of Library Jon Michaud, that the DVD archive staff is working on stuff like this more or less around the clock. The Oompa-Loompas, the Keebler elves, the coal-toting Susuwatari from Spirited Away, and even the mighty NYU adjuncts can hardly keep up with them.