Google Begins Archiving Print Magazines

Google (GOOG) took another step towards ingesting all the world’s printed knowledge. In addition to books and newspapers, Google Book Search now archives millions of pages of magazines from New York Magazine and Ebony to Popular Mechanics.

The magazines, many of them Hearst publication, have been scanned and digitized and are presented using a similar interface to the one Google recently developed for archived newspapers.

You can browse different covers of a magazine or dive into a specific issue and turn the scanned pages, which come complete with all of the old advertisements. You can search within an issue. You can zoom in and zoom out fairly quickly. There is also a subscribe link. And when you look at the page with the covers, a Google Map shows all the places mentioned in various issues, with links to the pages where those places are mentioned.

I couldn’t find any Time Inc. or Conde Nast publications. There is no Fortune, no Time, no Sports Illustrated, no New Yorker, no Vogue. There is no Newsweek either. Hopefully, these magazines will be added eventually. (Google already has a deal with Time Inc, which has opened up its archive of Time-Life photos to image search).

If print ever dies, at least there should be a digital copy of all of this history on Google.

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