Google brings old magazines back to life, online

On Tuesday Google announced a partnership with several publishers to bring complete catalogs of old magazines online.

By using the same scanning process that has been implemented for Google's Book Search product, these titles undergo optical character recognition and are indexed into Google's search engine. In a post on the company's official blog, Google said that the scanned works will first be available in Book Search, with integration into regular Google search results to follow.

Among the more notable publications are Popular Science, Men's Health, Ebony, and New York Magazine. As part of the partnership, magazine publishers are getting links leading users back to the publication's site. These show up on the side of the content, along with advertising and user reviews.

Google has not provided a full directory of scanned titles outside of using a magazine tag, which denotes titles that are not books. However, once you've discovered a title there's a really neat way to browse through its history by decade, which includes a Google Maps layer that shows you places mentioned with links right to that page or article.

Google now offers full copies of old magazines. The selection is limited, but it will hopefully grow to encompass many titles.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

It's not clear if Google or select publishers intend to further monetize this new program by selling full digital copies of certain titles. As it stands now, users are able to view entire copies of magazines, although they're not able to archive them for personal use offline.

[dragonbite]

Cool! So these magazines can live on and on!

[cimarronb]

I'm in favor of anything that exposes great magazine content to a wider audience. The "scan everything" model works really well for magazines with a historical archive, e.g., Popular Science, especially for researchers. This is a great service to magazines in general, and also allows people to see magazines that are just not available any more.

The quality of the pages is obviously limited by the scanning approach, and zooming in is a bit blurry. But, as a free offering this is still very useful.

Is this directly competitive with efforts such as Texterity's Coverleaf (www.coverleaf.com) or Zinio (www.zinio.com) which also make digital magazines available on a direct to consumer basis?

Much of the value-added of digital edition providers is the "business model" that supports publisher's circulation and revenue generating interests. The Google Magazine initiative provides a link back to their website, but not much more. With respect to the "quality" of the digital edition, digital edition providers can do many more things than Google. For example, more advanced "mark up" such as linking URLs and pages, rich media embedding, gatefolds, blow-in cards, audited delivery, and many other services that integrate the digital edition into the publisher's site.

Google is technically and financially capable of doing a lot, however, I believe that publishers will be interested in protecting their brand and leveraging their content beyond that of "sampling" via Google.

[jwmpc]

So all some enterprising printer maker needs to do is create a printer that can print and bind quality pages and magazines can go to pdf or scan distribution. Not good news for the large-scale printers and distributors, but good news for consumers.

Magazines need this kind of availability to regain relevance. Not just for historical archives, but for current content.

[redrobes]

would be nice to see journals -- literary, film, etc -- getting this kind of exposure as well. Google to the rescue!

[daleh--2008]

I'll still be waiting for MAD magazine.

[raywkirk]

Only marginally useful if you can't do text search.
Nice for browsing, but if you're looking for something specific, you're out of luck.
Still, a good start and better than nothing at all.

[c|net Reader]

The article says Google is doing OCR and including the text in the search engine.

[forever4now]

Great idea! And if it generates traffic to the magazine's website, it is a win-win for everyone.

[keneki7]

What about the writer and photographers that own copyright to their work? The publishers don't own the right to "reprint" these magazines without some agreement? I guess they have deep pockets and will crush any little guy who'll complain? Any other writers out there that wonder about this?

[jussruss]

This is fantabulous!!!