Magazine Archives On Google Books: How It Works For Publishers

Launch titles in the magazine division of Google Books are getting added visibility and advertising revenue.

By Jane Zarem
Monday, March 2, 2009

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When Johnson Publishing launched a new series called “ReThink” on its Ebonyjet.com Web site a year ago, it sparked an interest in finding a way to leverage the publisher’s valuable archive of print magazines. ReThink, which features articles from old issues of Ebony, Jet, and Black World (called Negro Digest until the 1960s), allows site visitors, young writers, and others to note and evaluate changes in fashion, interior design, the political vibe and any other categories.

“We had an intern for a while whose full-time job was looking up articles in the old print magazines,” says Eric Easter, chief of digital strategy. “We had recently completed a deal with the Associated Press for digitizing our photo archives—some 20 million photographs that were literally sitting in filing cabinets—but we thought having the text, as well as the full context of the articles in their original form, was really valuable. So that made us even more aggressive about the need to make our archives easily accessible. We considered several options, but all were prohibitively expensive.” Then he got a call from Google.

Around the same time, Google also approached the publishers of Popular Science, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and several other magazines with an offer none of them could easily refuse. Google invited them to participate as launch titles in the new magazine division of Google Books. Astonishingly, the deal included digitizing their entire archives for free. The publisher simply had to supply single or bound copies of the old print issues—which were sacrificed in the scanning process.

“We had hoped for years to digitize our entire archive,” says Gregg Hano, publisher of Popular Science, “but we could never come up with a financial model that would fly. So when Google approached us with an offer to digitize 136 years of our content at no cost to us, it got our attention.”

On December 9, 2008, Google added digitized magazine archives to its books.google.com site. Among the launch archives, in addition to Popular Science, were 54 years of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (1945-1998), Ebony and Black World since 1960, all issues of Jet and Ebony Jr., as well as Vegetarian Times, New York Magazine, Running, Women’s Health, Popular Mechanics, and others. The digital copies are exact replicas of the original issues, including ads, photography, and pagination. The service is free to the user and free to the publisher.

“We’re pleased to be part of this major project that Google has undertaken,” adds Kennette Benedict, Ph. D, executive director and publisher of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Our mission is to get our information out to people. As a small niche publication, this program really helps us reach a much larger audience with our own, very distinctive branding.”

Publishers also share revenue from contextual ads that Google places on each archived page. The share is negotiated. It’s “a good and fair deal,” according to Easter; “an equitable distribution,” according to Hano.

Next, and Coming Soon…

The project’s second phase, now underway, allows participating publishers to host their own archives on their own Web sites. “Once the archives reside on our site and become part of our Web site inventory,” says Easter, “visitors will be able to search our publications exclusively.” The deal requires free user access, except for the most recent 10 years of issues.

“We’re absolutely thrilled about this,” adds Hano. “Users will become involved in our content for longer periods of time. As a result, we’re very confident that we’ll see increases in online subscription sales.” And, of course, each publisher receives 100 percent of the revenue from any ads served against the archives on its own Web site.

The agreement with Google is nonexclusive, so Benedict’s organization is looking to repurpose some of its archived content into topical digital volumes, such as a history of nuclear proliferation or a collection of works by Manhattan Project scientists. And Easter is looking forward to creating widgets and tools based on the archives as a fun resource for the Ebonyjet.com audience—creating a cover widget as an iPhone application, for example.

Soon, Google is expected to fully integrate the magazine archives into its main search engine, which will introduce the participating magazines to countless new people. Even more important than providing added visibility for the magazine, according to Benedict, is what she believes is Google’s broader interest in making information from authoritative brands more visible on the Internet. And while all magazines archived on the Google Books site may not fall into the “expert” or “authority” category, the content of the participating magazines is fact-checked and considered reliable—or at least it’s attributable. So including these archives in the overall Google search engine will help people find more credible information on the Internet.

Ebony’s Community Archival Project

Free digitization of an entire print archive is hard for any publisher to ignore. The only catch is that the issues are destroyed in the process when the magazines are pulled apart so the pages can be fed into the scanner. Most publishers have multiple copies of issues from the most recent decades, whether as single issues or in bound volumes. They’re reluctant, however, to sacrifice a historic copy when only one or very few are available.

When Johnson Publishing was gathering issues of Ebony to send to Google, it got particularly dicey for the years 1945 to 1959 in terms of condition and the number of copies available in-house. So the publisher will use the void as a marketing vehicle by encouraging its audience to help find the lost volumes.

“We have a particularly special relationship with our audience, both generally and because Ebony was the only magazine for African Americans for the first 40 years of its 63-year existence,” says Eric Easter. “It’s still the only general-interest magazine for African-Americans. So it has a special historical significance to folks. And we know anecdotally that readers have copies of the magazines, because they ask if we’ll buy them. So we figure we’ll post the lost years, ask people to send the issues in, and give them recognition in the magazine. That way, it becomes sort of community archival project. It’s fun. And it gets our readers involved.”