Read Old Newspapers and Magazines Online

Below are a few more ways to get your favorite reading online and for free.

Google News – Google News indexes thousands of newspaper websites from around the world and organizes news in clusters for easy reading. In addition to current news, Google News also offers access to stories published in old newspapers that you can search for free.

Google Books – If you are looking for an older issue of a magazine, Google Books might be the best place to find it. The magazines are scanned and searchable and can be read online using the standard Google Book interface. Decades worth of material are available, and the magazines are laid out just as they were when they were originally printed, including the original articles, index, cover, and advertisements.

Trove – The National Library of Australia has a large selection of newspapers from across Australia archived online that anyone may read for free. All the newspapers are completely scanned and can be viewed online in any modern browser, or you may download them as a PDF for offline reading.

Library of Congress – The Library of Congress has a large repository of historic newspapers published in America between 1880 and 1922, available as PDFs. Though the library has made available newspapers from 14 states and Washington, DC., these states contain some of the largest newspapers and thus the archives are still a very valuable resource. Additionally, the site has a database of records of all newspapers printed in America from 1690 to the present.

The Olden Times – If you are looking for a popular article about a major historical event, the Olden Times may be a good place to look for it. Although it does not contain entire newspapers, it does have snippets including popular news articles, print advertisements, and personal information sections such as births and obituaries. All content is free, and the content ranges from 1788 to 1920.

OMA – Old Magazine Articles contains magazine pages covering from famous historical events. The articles can be downloaded as PDF files for free. They have been edited to remove advertisements from the original magazines.

BBC – The 'On This Day' section of BBC offers an online archive of some of the most significant stories broadcast by BBC News since 1950. You can select any date from the menu at the top of the page, and view the news from that date as well as today’s historical news.

How Many Books

How many books have ever been published in all of modern history? According to Google’s advanced algorithms, the answer is almost 130 million books. Yes, that number includes my books.

In order for Google Books to successfully catalog the world’s supply of printed knowledge, the company needed an estimate of the amount of books it needs to scan. That’s why Google set out to find the number.

First it had to define what a book is and agreed on ‘tome', an idealized bound volume. A tome can have millions of copies, like a bestseller or can exist in just one or two copies, such as a rare 'Tom Sawyer' first edition. ISBN, or International Standard Book Numbers, are designed to be unique identifiers for books but have only been around for  about 40 years and are mostly used in Western countries.

The company poured over a billion raw records and used many and various algorithms to determine and discard duplicates. Of course the absolute number needs to be constantly, because new books are being published every day. In fact, I have a new one that should be out within about a month. "Flowers, Foreplay, Facelifts, Flatulence - A humorous romp through the four stages of relationships."