Comments on: Google brings old magazines back to life, online

Company takes old issues into realm of online publishing, albeit through scans. In a new partnership, users can view old copies freely, from the comfort of their browser.

[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!!!