InsideGoogle

Google Book Search Adds Virtual Library

Google announced a new feature for Book Search today, a My Library feature that lets you select books in Book Search and add them to a saved library. You can share that library with others, who can view it as a simple list, or in the nice book cover view shown in the screenshot above. Another new feature shows popular quotes for a book when you look at a book’s page.

Two popular quotes from Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club:

I want you to do me a favor. I want you to hit me as hard as you can.

The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says.

I know this isn’t a typical Google thing, but Google should make a way for people to link their Amazon Associates ID to their book lists. No matter how nice Google’s Library looks, there’s a disincentive to use it as long as you can use Amazon’s system to earn a little money. It would be a simple add, and would remove that little roadblock.

According to The New York Times, Google will start charging this fall for full access to certain books, due to agreements made with certain publishers. For these in-copyright books, Google has worked with publishers to bring their full contents to Book Search, letting everyone search them and pay to read the entire book. Users will not be able to save their books or take them with them as e-books.

Google also added another new feature to Book Search: clip embedding. You can go to anywhere in any book they have scanned, select a section, and embed it in your blog (or post it straight to Blogger or Google Notebook). Sadly, this feature is only available for public domain books (and it doesn’t work in Opera). The embed comes as an image:

Or you can just ask for the raw text, if Google can recognize it. In the book above (so chosen because it was the #1 result for “betwixt”, Google can’t recognize jack. Still, it’s a cool feature that will hopefully get better, especially if they add it for all books they have an agreement for. I’d really love to be able to embed from Google Patent Search as well, and real embeds (not hotlinking images) from Google Trends.

I gotta ask: Are the ads in Google Book Search new? I don’t remember those before.

September 7th, 2007 Posted by Nathan Weinberg | Google Book, Search | 4 comments