14 DAY TRIAL // On Tuesday, the Mountain View, California-based company announced that it had begun adding magazine articles to its book database, working in partnership with publishers. Among the most renowned titles to enter the archives, the company named the New York Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Ebony, as well as a few others. Although it currently has only a limited amount of publications on-line, Google said in a statement that these numbers would soon start to grow exponentially.
The company says that the measure will bring new life to countless articles, which could be used either for referencing or for informative purposes. Thus far, technicians have scanned about a million articles, and uploaded them on their database. The copies will feature the exact same appearance they had on their print edition, ads included. Navigation will be easy, as the 'back' and 'forward' buttons will simply turn the page back and forth.
Years of work by some of the world's most renowned publications will now be reusable under the new initiative. Publishers already gave their consent for the use of their copyright, as Google learned its lesson from three years ago, when the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild sued the company, after it announced its intentions of creating the world's largest free book repository.
Google also says that, when the time is right and enough articles are inserted into the database, it will even start providing entries from magazines as standard responses to Google.com queries. This will provide searchers with an alternative means of documentation, other than Wikipedia, which now has a monopoly on the top entries in almost all Google searches.
"Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results. For our magazine publisher partners, this initiative gives new digital life to years' worth of work. These pages will contain magazine branding, links to the main magazine sites, and ads, providing our partners with the means to reach new readers and to expand their brand on-line," the company says.