The lists and blogosphere appear to be abuzz with news of Google Print ... this is the project hailed as making Google into a sort of Alexandrian Library for the 21st century. Most commentators are impressed at the amount of material available from "generous publishers", and there is a lot, but perhaps a bit of curbing our enthusiasm is in order. Keeping in mind that it's still beta (does Google ever take anything out of beta?), we should note that we're not getting access to full texts. A search for Roman, e.g., brought up the curiously round 100 000 hits. A cursory look at those results caused some initial excitement: wow, Brunt's Roman Imperial Themes ... but it turns out to be just three pages of the section on Sulla. The index and TOCs are there, which are useful, of course. Newer tomes, such as Robert Turcan's The Cults of the Roman Empire provide just the TOCs. All this is useful, still, but the cynical might notice the links to various places to order the books over in the left sidebar ...

Further fiddling, however, suggests that you can get beyond three pages if you know how to fiddle with the search ... e.g., if you type brunt laus, you'll get some pages from his Laus Imperii article ... yet there is a limit; trying to go beyond that brought up this:

Thank you for using Google Print.

You have either reached a page that is unavailable for viewing or reached your viewing limit for this book.

Google protects works that are under copyright by restricting access to certain pages and restricting the number of pages you can view. You may continue to take advantage of Google Print by clicking on About this Book. Thank you for using Google Print.

... didn't see any journals ...

Lest this sound negative, I still think this is a good thing ... it's still nowhere near "Alexandrian Library" status, though ...