Playboy puts 57 years of articles, nudity online

Nostalgic for Playboy magazines from your past? Now they're available online.

(CNN) -- If you've long harbored tender memories of Miss February 1988 but misplaced your dusty old box of Playboys, take heart.

The House that Hef built is putting all its magazines -- from the inaugural December 1953 issue with cover girl Marilyn Monroe, to the current one with rock heiress Lizzy Jagger -- into an online searchable database.

Playboy Enterprises on Thursday announced a subscription service that provides online access to every page of every issue, giving readers everywhere the chance to catch up with those, um, fiction excerpts, interviews and investigative articles.

Subscriptions are available for $8 per month, $60 per year and $100 for two years. The service, called i.Playboy.com, is optimized for the iPad and will be updated with each monthly issue.

This 1985 issue featured nude photos of Madonna, taken years earlier before she became famous.

iPlayboy features every pictorial, interview, centerfold, investigative reporting piece, story, cartoon, advertisement and image that ever appeared in the magazine -- more than 130,000 pages in total. The site will also feature exclusive videos and new curated content.

The long list of celebrities who have posed nude for Playboy include Bo Derek, Pamela Anderson, Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone.

The magazine was founded in 1953 by Hugh Hefner, who built it into an entertainment empire. But circulation of the printed magazine has dipped since Playboy's 1970s heyday, and its Web offerings have struggled to compete with explicit pornography sites.

Playboy.com has about 6 million monthly visitors. Last year Playboy launched The Smoking Jacket, a nudity-free, "safe-for-work" website.

[Source : edition.cnn.com]