Google Book Search Adds New Features

Google’s stated vision is to organize the world’s information. As big and idealistic this goal maybe, the company has gone to great lengths in trying to move towards it. One example of these efforts is its Book Search service. It had a rough start partly due to the sensitive issue of copyright that it encompasses, but it has continued to move forward. Discussion on the benefits and advantages that Google Book Search brings to the users is worth a post or two already by itself, but I digress for now.

Let’s focus instead on what the Mountainview Company has added this week to Google Book Search to make the service appeal more to its users. In the coming posts I will discuss these new features in details with more discussion on how to go about using them in your research work or whatever purpose that you use the book search service for.

Sharing Book Clips
In its blog post, a Google Book Search team member took notice in the fact that although the web has allowed us to share, link and aggregate a lot of things online, sharing books and specific book quotes online is still rather difficult and a manual effort. (In this regard though, it must be noted that an excellent web project already exists that also aims to do this, albeit in a different approach: Librarything.com.) Google Book search now allows users to make clippings of a particular part of a book already in the public domain. These clips can be posted in users’ Google Notebook or Blogger blog.

Popular Passages
This feature, which can be seen on a Book’s “About this Book” page, shows popular passages from that book that has been used or quoted in many other books. This feature helps users to explore interesting ideas and connections in books.

My Library
When users find interesting books in book search, this feature allows them to “collect and catalog” these selected books in their own library. This feature needs for a user to be logged in to his Google account to work. There’s an RSS feed for the contents of the user’s Library, and also the option to Import books (by entering the ISBN of books) or export the a user’s library into an xml file.