AfterDawn: News

Google halts its newspaper digitization operations

Google has confirmed that it will stop digitizing old newspapers, blaming publishers who were looking to make money off the archives instead of just leaving them free online like Google wanted.

All old digital articles will be found at news.google.com/archivesearch but the collection will not grow starting today.



Says Google of the move:

We work closely with newspaper partners on a number of initiatives, and as part of the Google News Archives digitization program we collaborated to make older newspapers accessible and searchable online.

"We don't plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives, and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing.

There are currently 3.5 million issues available in the collection, from 2000 different newspapers.

A March 23rd, 1752 edition of the Halifax Gazette in Nova Scotia is the oldest issue available.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 21 May 2011 0:29

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• 3 comments

• toked

  why doesn't google start a subscription service where you pay like $5 a month and you have access to all the newspapers, which will be better than no money.
  

  21.5.2011 06:59 #1

• oappi

  Originally posted by toked: why doesn't google start a subscription service where you pay like $5 a month and you have access to all the newspapers, which will be better than no money. Because they are not doing it for charity. If they had to charge $5 userbase would shrink significantly meaning less people would see google's ads on that service. This means that they would probably get less money. What is surprising is that they didn't figure out any other payment plan like some % of ad revenue from ads that are associated with their articles. I still hope this is just googles way of saying "take our offer or you get nothing", to offer we don't know about.
  
  Also i don't think google has any non-enterprise services that actually cost something to use or do they?

  21.5.2011 20:41 #2

• KillerBug

  While I like the idea of a central cloud with everything, it brings to mind the classic "1984"...it is a real bother to modify and destroy originals scattered throughout countless private collections, but it is very easy to "correct" history if everything is in a cloud.
  

  http://killerbug666.wordpress.com/

  22.5.2011 07:05 #3