Google thumbs through a few magazines
The Book Search has gone softcover, and how -- Google Book Search has begun to include scanned and searchable magazines alongside more traditional print forms.
For magazine junkies, in other words, your holiday gift was delivered early this year; yes indeed, baby's got back issues. It's unclear how many titles are currently in the system. Google's not telling, but among the treats we saw as we compulsively hit Refresh on the main Book Search page were New York magazine (and several for other US cities), Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ebony, Jet, Vegetarian Times, Baseball Digest, Factsheet Five, Maximum PC, and American Cowboy.
Hitting Refresh to see what's available is part of the fun for now, but if you're looking for a particular title, search will locate it if it's in the system. Once you've found your joy, the magazines can be browsed much as one usually browses pages in Google Book Search.
The Browse All Issues view, though, is something special. A bar along the top presents covers and allows you to scroll along, or to jump by decades. (Some magazines have more copious archives than others.) Tables of contents link into specific articles, Google Maps makes a cameo to show you where places mentioned in the issue are located, and addresses that the system can parse are linked. (Suppose J. Houston Maupin of Tipp City, Ohio is really still at that address and offering those instructions for building one's own jet engine, as promised in the February 1950 issue of Popular Science?)
It's an impressive amount of content, but can it avoid dragging Google back into the court system over copyright, as the original Book Search did? Signs point to yes -- for the most part. The difference lies in who holds the copyrights.
Book authors generally tend to retain copyright on their material. Magazine writers, on the other hand, rarely do; staffers' output is simply part of the job, and freelancers usually sign contracts stating that their work is "for hire." Over the last 15-20 years, magazine publishers have also gotten more canny about requiring that writers turn over copyright for publishing in "all media known or hereafter invented."
Considering the sheer volume of material, it's not impossible that individual writers will find items that shouldn't be in Google yet. One imagines, say, Harlan Ellison -- notoriously not a fan of this things-being-online craze -- sitting up tonight searching on his name and any nouns he might have used over the past 60 years. He'll be joined by a great number of magazine junkies who'll be viewing Nirvana, or at least getting a glimpse of the gate.