The only downer is a basic undeniable fact that Google can’t do anything about: LIFE was an oversized tabloid-format publication–taller than it was wide–and computer displays are defiantly horizontal, and limited in resolution. Reading LIFE in your browser feels a little like scanning through issues using a virtual microfilm machine, despite conveniences such as thumbnails of pages and a zoom feature. (Tip: For the best reading experience, choose the full-screen mode and the facing-pages view, then zoom the magazine to fill the screen. You’ll still have to squint a little, but it’ll be worth it.)

Okay, Google Books does offer one feature that makes its LIFE archive infinitely more useful than microfilm could ever be: full-text searching of the magazine’s entire history. That’s how I’m finding gems like this 1963 feature on Polaroid’s first 60-second film and this 1964 ad for a Sony TV with a four-inch screen. There are still things about Google Books’ interface I don’t understand, such as why there doesn’t seem to be any browsable list of magazine titles that would make it easier to locate a particular publication. (LIFE is plastered all over over the Google Book home page at the moment, but when they bump it for something else it’ll be surprisingly difficult to find.) I also can’t figure out a way to search a particular publication, then sort the results by date. (I wanted to see when LIFE first mentioned computers, a topic it would cover heavily over the years.)*

But I feel guilty for being critical here–LIFE on Google Books may not be perfect, but that doesn’t prevent it from being sheer joy.
________________________________________

*I just figured out how to do this–it involves using advanced search and then entering the name of the magazine in a field confusingly labeled “Return books with the title.” Which brings up a question: Should all the magazines currently living in Google Books be spun off into something called Google Magazines?

A home page for the LIFE collection lives at images.google.com/hosted/life, or you can just go to images.google.com,  type in whatever keywords you like, and append “source:life” to the end of the query.

The images look great and are in reasonably high resolution, and I can’t think of many more entertaining ways to delve through a sizable chunk of 20th century history than to browse your way through them. A few queriws I had fun with:

astronaut

american president

hippie

ice cream

baseball

fad

movie star

macy’s

All of this is, of course, free, but there is a commercial aspect: You can click through from any image to buy it as a print. Oddly enough, I don’t see any link through to information about what is and isn’t permissible to do with these photos. Search Engine Land has a good post that links to a FAQ, but says that this FAQ doesn’t spell out LIFE’s stance on reuse: They’re up for grabs for personal, noncommercial use but not for professional purposes. I’m hoping that I won’t go to copyright jail if I give you a peek at the searching interface:

Highly recommended–just make sure that you don’t begin browsing if you have any pressing, immediate deadlines…