Google Books Gets Some AJAX
Google announced an update to Google Book Search, adding some AJAX to improve your free book searching experience. The main thing, a typical AJAX feature, is that pages don’t reload when you turn pages in the book. Pages appear one above the next, infinitely scrolling (well, until you run afoul of copyright restrictions, at least). You can choose between 
one page and 
two page views for out-of-copyright books (one page only for in-copyright), and just 
drag your way up and down, like you were reading it in Adobe Reader.
They’ve done a great job cleaning up the interface, with book reading pages almost entirely filled with the book (very much resembling Google Video, in fact). There’s even a full-screen mode switch to completely remove the entire interface and focus on just reading. The book contents page appears to contain even more information, including live links to chapters, related books, and highlighted pages, as well as tags.
The official Google blog details all of the changes.
A lot of links on the official blog don’t appear to be working as expected for me:
http://books.google.com/books?vid=OCLC01581436&id=EM6nHWWQ3TIC&pg=PP10
http://books.google.com/books?vid=NYPL:33433068198005&id=MPDMpD2w_2gC&pg=PA65#PPP18,M2
…for example.
Are they using Flash? Java? ActiveX? Oh well. I didn’t find it in the source while quickly checking it, and the last time Google cared about my feedback was a long time ago, so I won’t bother them with anything like this.
Comment by Tim | November 26, 2006
[…] The site features a nice interface, with two panes, images of the scans of the book, searching within the book you are already looking at, and even downloading full PDFs of the book if it is in the Internet Archive. Google just unveiled a new interface for its book search, one that puts the book on most of the webpage and scrolls through the entire book, not loading pages seperately as Windows Live does (almost like the Adobe Reader interface). Microsoft should take some cues from it for release 2. […]
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