Google's efforts to digitize the world's book collection have drawn the ire of some book publishers. So what's the next step? Digitizing magazines of course. Nobody ever got in trouble for doing that, right?

But seriously, Google has announced that working with publishers, the company has digitized current and back issues of magazines including Ebony, Popular Science, and New York Magazine. You can find magazines by searching by title. Or you can conduct keyword searches using Google Book Search and magazine results will show up alongside results from books.

Google says it has begun to digitize millions of articles, but there are a ton of popular magazines that are not included in the index, presumably because Google hasn't yet been able to negotiate an agreement with the publishers.

Mygazines made a splash a few months ago by launching a service that lets you read your favorite magazines online - without paying. The plan might have worked if the company had, I don't know, partnered with magazine publishers to make free ad-supported versions of the magazine available. But that's not what happened. Instead, Mygazines encouraged users to scan their own magazines and upload them to share with others.

Flash forward a few months and Mygazines is no more. A visit to the company's homepage shows a message saying that the service has gone under due to "monetary reasons and the state of the global economy." Because that's what did it in. The global economy. Not a flawed business model that was incurring the wrath of publishers.

[via Wired]

Want to keep up on the kind of news and cocktail party talk you can only get from long, detailed, and occasionally dry magazine articles, but don't have the time? Let Brijit do the reading for you.

Brijit is a new magazine abstract service. The site includes 100 word abstracts (or shorter) describing the key points of articles from about 60 magazines, TV news programs, and newspapers. The summaries are written by avid readers who are paid about $5 a pop. It's probably not worth your time unless to sign up as a writer unless you were planning on reading a lot of articles anyway. But if you are, you can add value to the site while making a few bucks.

Writers also rate the articles, so you have a good idea whether you want to read the full article at a glance. While this convention certainly makes Brijit a lot more useful, it does make us wonder whether Brijit can afford to continue paying writers to crank out abstracts of articles with one or fewer stars. Because seriously, who's going to read even the 100 word synopsis of that article?

Since each abstract links to the original article, we hope Brijit won't get on the nerves of content producers.

[via Read/WriteWeb]

Over the last few decades, traditional print media like newspapers and magazines have witnessed a decline in circulation numbers. That is, fewer people have been reading printed publications, instead opting for other news delivery options like radio, cable stations and the web. There are many theories as to why this is the case. Some people say slanted, politically-lopsided news coverage is turning off readers. This could be part of it.

But the real issue behind print circulation shrinkage lies with the news consumer. The way people prefer to consume information has changed drastically, so much that, at least in the States, newspaper publishers have actually seen 15-year shift in the age demographic patronizing their product. Why?

There are two harbingers of doom that newspapers are only now waking up to. The first is hyperlocalism: the idea that news reporters and editors can best serve their community by reporting what happens within their community. A community doesn't have to be geographically defined either: news consumers are grouped by geography, sure, but also by common interests, say sports, or even a single sports team. Some independent blogs that cover local high school football are doing better in terms of reach than the printed weekly's box score page.

Perhaps this is why web sites that cover things in a hyper-local way are building viable, profitable businesses. Perhaps this is also why traditional news shops, which publish a lot of national, "generic-interest" material (ie. recycled Associated Press stories) are struggling to find subscribers.

Even Download Squad operates in a hyperlocal manner. We have a community to serve that shares a common interest in nifty technology solutions, mostly software of course, and wants to keep abreast of the latest in this very well-defined space. Sister site Engadget operates in the same vain. The result of this hyperlocalism? A thriving, viable publishing business that serves its community. This is truly a concept where the purpose (serving a local community) and the means to achieve that purpose (serving a local community) are actually the same!