Book Search My Library

As I mentioned in my post last week, Google has souped-up their Booksearch service by adding “social” features that lets users of Google Book search share their finds on the book search service. This can be the in the form of a clipping of a part of a book or the new My Library feature, which allows a user to add books found in his or her book search to be added to a virtual library, which can then be shared with others.

When you’re logged in to your Google account and you go to Google Book Search, you will see a link to your Library at the upper right set of links.

As with most Google products in their early stage of product evolution, the Google Booksearch Library sports a very minimalist user interface, showing a grid of all the books present in the user’s library, a way to filter the showed books with Labels filter, a link to import and export library and lastly, an RSS feed.

Each book in your entry contains information about the book, your current star ranking for the book, tags and a way to edit them (called labels by Google), As well as a link to create a review for that particular book.

Adding books to your Library
You can add books to your library from the Google Book search results page. Just click the link (Add to My Library) for that particular book item. The books added to your library will have an icon to let you know that they exist in the library next time they appear in search results. You can also import books to your library by entering the ISBNs of that books that you’d like to add. On the same note, it’s also possible to export your whole library into an xml.

Sharing your Library
The URL for your library can be sent to your friends, which they can access to view your library collection. There’s also an RSS feed for all the books in your library.