bmattock
Veteran
For those of you who do not know, Google has been archiving and scanning books like crazy for the past couple of years. Anything and everything they could get their hands on. Some things are out of copyright and they provide full-text downloads in PDF form, some are still protected and you can read them online, some you can only read excerpts. There's lots more, you can check it out at:
http://books.google.com
Interesting for us - Google has slowly been putting all the magazines it can find online, full scans, including text searches. For this to happen, they have been approaching and asking various magazine publishers to submit their entire archive for (sadly) destructive scanning and archiving. I found out it about this via magazines I read.
Popular Science - Google Books
I haven't found any of the currently popular photo magazines online yet - no Popular Photography or Shutterbug, but that doesn't mean they won't make it. Popular Science is there, as is Popular Mechanics and so on.
However, you can search for articles of interest about photography in various magazines that have been scanned by Google, by going to this search form:
Google Books 'magazine' Advanced Search
I found articles like this one:
A Close-Up of the Rock-and-Roll Photographer's Greatest Hits - New York Magazine, Sep 19, 1983
For me, this is important. Books tend to continue to exist, and the information in them remains accessible for a very long time. Plus, there have been efforts made to digitize books at many levels, from the Library of Congress to Google Books.
But magazines are ephemeral, and tend to vanish. They're typically printed on cheap paper, they're here today, gone tomorrow in the same sense as newspapers to some extent. And yet, what magazine articles tend to cover, which books do not, is more of a feeling of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, what people are thinking and what the fashions and trends are or were at any given point. It's a fascinating glimpse into (in this case) photography that puts it into the context of its own times.
Anyway, just wanted to share this. I hope it continues to grow, adds more magazine titles to the library, and becomes even more of a useful tool.
http://books.google.com
Interesting for us - Google has slowly been putting all the magazines it can find online, full scans, including text searches. For this to happen, they have been approaching and asking various magazine publishers to submit their entire archive for (sadly) destructive scanning and archiving. I found out it about this via magazines I read.
Popular Science - Google Books
I haven't found any of the currently popular photo magazines online yet - no Popular Photography or Shutterbug, but that doesn't mean they won't make it. Popular Science is there, as is Popular Mechanics and so on.
However, you can search for articles of interest about photography in various magazines that have been scanned by Google, by going to this search form:
Google Books 'magazine' Advanced Search
I found articles like this one:
A Close-Up of the Rock-and-Roll Photographer's Greatest Hits - New York Magazine, Sep 19, 1983
For me, this is important. Books tend to continue to exist, and the information in them remains accessible for a very long time. Plus, there have been efforts made to digitize books at many levels, from the Library of Congress to Google Books.
But magazines are ephemeral, and tend to vanish. They're typically printed on cheap paper, they're here today, gone tomorrow in the same sense as newspapers to some extent. And yet, what magazine articles tend to cover, which books do not, is more of a feeling of the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, what people are thinking and what the fashions and trends are or were at any given point. It's a fascinating glimpse into (in this case) photography that puts it into the context of its own times.
Anyway, just wanted to share this. I hope it continues to grow, adds more magazine titles to the library, and becomes even more of a useful tool.
dazedgonebye
Veteran
I've been reading Popular Mechanics back many years now.
It's a hoot.
It's a hoot.