A month ago, Google announced that it has begun putting magazines in Google Books. In one way, this is a new direction for Google. But looked at broadly, it’s really not so new — Google has been putting old journals in Google Books for a long time. The basic difference between the newly announced “Google magazines” and Google’s “old journals,” of course, is the date of publication — The titles that are being treated as “magazines” are generally published in the last 50 years or so. But some of these also include much older issues, in some cases, such as Popular Science, going back to the 1800’s. A bit of digging — searching for words in an article — finds a nice case of a title that’s in Google Books both ways, as a magazine and as an old journal. Snippets from the “About this book” and “About this magazine” pages below show differences.
Old journals – The journal / book format
Old journals are given the same treatment as books, with each volume of the journal being considered a book. The record here is for volume 26 of Popular Science Monthly (the old name of Popular Science).
Old journals are scanned into Google Books by libraries, in the case shown here, Harvard University. As with other books scanned by libraries, the About page has a selection of thumbnail images, giving an idea of what sort of graphics are in the book. Also note the button to Download the entire volume in PDF format.
The Magazine format
In contrast to journal/book format, in which the volume (made up of several issues) is treated as the basic record unit, in magazines, the basic record unit is the issue. This record is for the Feb 1885 issue of Popular Science.
Comparing this with the journal/book format, this lacks thumbnail preview images and it also does not support downloading a PDF of the issue. It does, however, have the great advantage over the journal/book format, that all issues are connected in the Browse all issues menu.