Magazine articles now included in Google Book Search—along with books
Google Book Search is “partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles from titles as diverse as New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, and Ebony.”
Just use GBS as you normally would. Magazine articles will show up with books, and you can also look just for articles.
Excerpt from Google blog:
“Are you a baseball history fanatic? Try a search for [hank aaron pursuing babe ruth's record] on Google Book Search. You’ll find a link to a 1973 Ebony article about Hank Aaron, written as he closed in on Babe Ruth’s original record for career home runs. You can read the article in full color and in its original context, just as you would in the printed magazine. Scroll back a few pages, for example, and you’ll find a two-page spread on 1973’s fall fashions. If you’d like to read further, you can click on “Browse all issues” to view issues from across the decades.”
Let’s hope that Google can keep the links stable and indeed have access to the material for a long time. If so, citations in e-books could go directly to source articles.
Full text
Yes, Google retrieves the full texts. Hmm. A little inspiration for book publishers? Just what does this mean for networked books? The industry urgently needs standards for reliable and precise book-to-book linking, and if publishers can’t persuade the IDPF to set the standards, then a proprietary approach may prevail. And this isn’t even to mention the issue of which archives will catch on, long term. Will Google pre-empt not just libraries but also publishers’ own archives in time—including maybe even those for internal use? When networked books finally catch on, the game will change in a number of ways.
Usual reminder: I own a tiny speck of Google as a long-term investment for retirement purposes.
Related: Techmeme roundup and Ars Technica.
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