Product Description:

“10 years of MAGIC Magazine review columns at your fingertips. Almost 1400 pages of searchable text, over 1500 books, videotapes, and tricks (that's close to 3/4 of a million words)”.

Review:

Yes, it’s true. For under $20, I purchased 1,379 pages of high quality magic reviews. The e-book includes all of Michael Close’s review columns from May 1995 through April 2005. It’s a download, so you can start reading immediately. Instant gratification can be a sweet thing.

Of course, there’s always room for improvement. Here are some things that I noticed:

The book is indexed by year. I would have preferred an alphabetic index by product name. The problem is mitigated by Adobe’s built-in search function. You can search the entire e-book for any word you like. For instance, I recently searched for “mentalism”, “billet”, “highly recommended” and “Osterlind”.

The book does not include any pictures that may have been printed with the original articles.

The book does not include reviews for every trick under the sun. There’s so much good stuff in here that it really gets your hopes up. It’s a bit of a let down when the search feature finds no matches. Let’s hope the next edition has 10,000 pages.

The book downloads as a zip file, but I can’t seem to find a difference between the zipped and unzipped documents. This really isn’t a problem; it’s just kind of strange. Maybe my computer unzipped it automatically.


Nevertheless, the e-book has to be one of the best buys in magic. Therefore, I'm only deducting a half of a point for the above criticisms.

I’ll give it an easy 9.5 out of 10.

Thanks,

Elliott