Google Magazines

Google Books, a digitized library of print materials, has quite a few magazines available in addition to all their other high quality offerings. I remember reading that publishers can choose whether they provide free access to back issues via Google Book Search, or use it to draw traffic to pay-to-view archives, so we assume the same goes for magazines. That said, all of the searches we tried led to free-access page images.

Life Magazine on Google Books
Although there hasn’t been a whole lot of publicity on this, Google books began adding full text magazines. They have digitized at least 100 magazines from cover to cover, showing us the ads, pictures and articles. In addition to the historic aspect, they are really interesting and fun to look through. By digitizing every page, it is almost like going to the Periodicals stacks on the second floor of a library and flipping through them right there on the shelves.

Amongst their digitized work are