Tuesday, December 9, 2008
Google Launches Magazine Search
Google officially announced their "initiative to help bring more magazine archives and current magazines online, partnering with publishers to begin digitizing millions of articles". You can read it directly from the google blog.Generally, I'm in favor of anything that exposes great magazine content to a wider audience. The "scan everything" model works well for magazines with a large historical archive, especially for researchers. This is a service to magazines in general, and allows people to see magazines that are both in and out-of-print.
The quality of the pages is obviously limited by the scanning approach, and zooming in is a bit blurry. But, as a free offering this is still very useful.
Is this directly competitive with efforts such as Coverleaf (www.coverleaf.com) which makes digital magazines available on a direct to consumer basis?
Much of the value-added of Texterity is the "business model" that supports publisher's circulation and revenue generating interests. The Google Magazine initiative provides a link back to their website, but not much more. With respect to the "quality" of the digital edition, digital edition providers can do many more things than Google. For example, more advanced "mark up" such as linking URLs and pages, rich media embedding, gatefolds, blow-in cards, audited delivery, and many other services that integrate the digital edition into the publisher's site.
Google is technically and financially capable of doing a lot, however, I believe that publishers will be interested in protecting their brand and leveraging their content beyond that of "sampling" via Google.
Labels: Google
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]