Google Books Introduces Magazine Directory

Google Books may be getting all of the attention because of the high-profile lawsuit and the subsequent settlement involving it, but, in the meantime, the service is continuing to evolve and it's important to remember that it's not just about the books. Google has been focusing on magazines more lately and there are already a number of titles in Google's library. Until now, though, actually finding them proved to be almost impossible, unless you already knew what you were looking for. Thankfully, Google has now released a simple interface to browse through all of the titles.

“One of the feature requests that I got from friends and family was to add a way to browse all the magazines available. Someone even created a Facebook group called Get Google Magazine Search to provide a list of indexed titles,” Jeffrey Peng, a software engineer on Google Books, wrote.

“The group has 45 members and growing, so before it reached millions of members and there were protests in front of my house, I decided that I better act fast. I'm happy to announce that last week I coded up a page on Google Books that lets you browse the available magazine titles.”

So far, Google has only had less than 100 magazines, which provide regular updates and are available to search and read on Google Books. But, perhaps because they are so few, actually finding them has proven to be harder than it needed to be especially for someone who didn't know if a specific magazine was available. In fact, Google has been getting some requests for a page that would feature all of the magazines included.

This has prompted Google Software Engineer Jeffery Peng to act and throw together an interface to allow users to browse all of the titles. The feature is now available in either a thumbnail view or a list view, which provides some additional details. It isn't exactly bristling with features, but it gets the job done. The magazines are sorted alphabetically and you can choose to see only the ones available in full for free or those in the public domain. This works for now, but when Google gets around to adding a lot more magazines to the service, it will have to come up with a much more advanced interface.