I love Google Book Search and its many features including the full and partial preview of digitized books. It’s really a big help when planning to buy a particular book title and you want to preview its content without going to the nearest bookstore. Equally useful is the fact that you can read a book in its entirety if those books are already out of copyright restrictions. Now, Google is bringing the same book preview/reading experience to digitized magazines.
Google Book Search is slowly building up its database of digitized magazines and making them available via the Google Book Search, and even soon as part of the Google web search results.
Just like the Google Book Preview, past issues of popular Magazines which Google has added to its database can be read in full color and context. It even contains links to previous issues of a particular magazine. Google has partnered with major publishers to make this happen and hopefully more magazine titles will come to Google’s fold.
Magazine contents on Google Book Search adds up to Google’s other online content database which include books, newspapers and images. What it needs now is to utilize YouTube into an educational video hub which would contain not only user-generated videos but other educational materials which can be previewed and stream online. Make that happen and Google can claim that it has become a huge multimedia online library.
Librarians may not like this, but we all have to accept the fact that when it comes to making information available online, nothing can’t seem to stop Google from becoming a huge virtual library which might soon replace the traditional library as we know it.
