The Technologizer, Wall Street Journal, and NPR report that Google Books has just added Spy Magazine to its list of magazines whose contents are viewable online for free. So far, it only has about half the issues available, but the rest are on their way. As Technologizer blogger Harry McCracken notes, Spy’s snarky style seemed like a blueprint for large portions of the blogosphere that came after, even those who had never read an issue.
But it’s not necessarily all good. McCracken points out:
As I’ve said before, I love Google Books so much that I feel guilty bringing this up–but it’s still not a terribly satisfactory way to read magazines. If you don’t know thatSpy‘s there, you might not find it: As far as I can tell, there’s no way to search for magazines by name. I also see no way to search a specific title, then sort the results in chronological order. The digitization of SPY is also tad sloppy–a half-dozen later issues apparently don’t have month/year data associated with them, so they appear before the first issue. Basically, it still feels like a book site that’s been slightly rejiggered for magazines.
I have to agree. When I heard from NPR (which didn’t include a link) that Google had Spy, I went to Google Books to try to find it, but when I searched on Spy or Spy Magazine nothing useful came up. I finally had to find the article in the Technologizer just to find the link! McCracken wonders if Google will sooner or later come up with a dedicated “Google Magazines” that will fix some of these shortcomings.
I checked it out on my iPad, too, and while it was largely readable (even though the iPad’s screen is slightly smaller than magazine page size), the interface was slow and clunky. I had to drag with two fingers even when zoomed in to view the magazine pages in the whole screen, since Mobile Safari still considered it to be a window.
At any rate, it’s great that these older magazines are finding a home on the web where anyone can read them for free—if they can find them.
