Take Note(s): Highlighting your Google eBooks

Thursday, December 08, 2011 at 9:03 AM

Posted by Xinxing Gu, Google Books Product Manager

Like many of you, we love to highlight and mark up our books, capturing insights, important notes to remember, or even gathering opinions to later share with our favorite authors. Starting today, you'll also be able to break out the colored highlighters and pens with Google eBooks in the Web Reader.

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Keep me posted about new books with Google Alerts

Thursday, October 20, 2011 at 1:01 PM

Posted by Xinxing Gu, Google Books Associate Product Manager

If you're an avid reader like me, you probably are always eagerly awaiting the next book by your favorite author, or new books on the topic you’re interested in. However, you might not always find out about those new books when they come out. Starting this week, you can set up a Google Alert for books and receive email notices when new books that match your interests become available.

To create an alert for books, go to Google Alerts, type in the keywords you are interested in about a book, (whether it’s title, author name, or topic) and choose “Books” from the Type drop-down button, and create. You can also preview the email you'll be sent on the right side panel. Once you create the alert, you will automatically begin receiving notification emails about new, recently published books in Google Books.

Some of my personal favorite alerts for books are:

• George R. R. Martin’s latest works
• New travel books on Hawaii, The Grand Canyon and your other favorite locales
• Books on programming with Java, HTML5 and other languages

Try setting up alerts for your own favorite books now! Read the full post

Google releases 500 scans of Ancient Greek and Latin texts for research

Friday, June 25, 2010 at 8:46 AM

Posted by Will Brockman, Software Engineer

As an undergraduate I dabbled in Classics, and I remember being surprised by the term hapax legomenon (ἅπαξ λεγόμενον). That's "written once" -- a word that occurs in only one place in the written record. It seems impossible, but happens surprisingly often: over 300 words in the Iliad appear nowhere else in Greek. So much has been lost (all but 7 of Sophocles' 123 plays, for instance) that every text that survives is precious. They communicate the self-understanding of their cultures -- which helped shape the modern world -- and have commanded scholarly attention for centuries. For these artifacts of a long-vanished world, passed down by generations of hand copying, merely establishing the text requires careful study of crabbed handwriting and critical comparison of divergent copies.

Modern scholars of Ancient Greek and Latin, continuing in this tradition, are working to create comprehensive electronic editions of these texts. For anyone who remembers studying Latin the old way, constantly paging through a dictionary, these electronic texts are a revelation. Now we have Caesar's Gallic Wars (Perseus Digital Library) with every word parsed and translated, along with linguistic commentary and a collection of references to the text from other works. We can read about Sophocles’ 123 plays in the Stoa Consortium's electronic edition of the Suda, a 10th-century Byzantine Greek encyclopedia. And scholars around the world can now consult a high-resolution digital scan of Venetus A, one of the best manuscripts of the Iliad, at the Center for Hellenic Studies.

I'm pleased to announce that Google Books is now assisting this work by sharing high-resolution digital scans of over 500 volumes of Ancient Greek and Latin, dating from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. (Of course, downloadable versions of over a million volumes in all fields are available from books.google.com, in a more compressed form.) Jon Orwant and I created this collection using a list of several thousand important Classics volumes identified by our collaborators Professor Gregory Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University. We are analyzing additional volumes and expect to be able to release more high-resolution scans in the future.

These scans will aid the development of accurate OCR (Optical Character Recognition) algorithms for Ancient Greek, and provide the basis for electronic versions of important editions of these Classics texts; but perhaps their greatest value will be for the development of new methods in this emerging field. We’re honored that Professor Crane called this donation “a major contribution to what scholars can do.” Read the full post 0 comments

Discover Books and Magazines using Search Options

Friday, September 18, 2009 at 9:55 AM

Posted by Matthew Gray, Grant Dasher, and Garrett Rooney, Google Books Software Engineers

Earlier this year, we introduced the Search Options panel in web search, making it easier to perform queries that limit results to a particular type of content- such as videos, forums, and reviews. We are now making it even easier to find books and magazines by making all of the content on Google Books searchable using the Search Options panel.

This will provide easier access to books and magazines by letting you slice and dice your results with certain characteristics. For example, you can now search for only books or magazines or for only content that you can preview in Google Books.



Try this yourself when you search the web using Google by clicking "Show options..." and selecting "Books".

Please note that this is currently only available in the United States, but we look forward to making this available elsewhere in the future. Read the full post 0 comments

Download Over a Million Public Domain Books from Google Books in the Open EPUB Format

Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 11:05 AM

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager

Over the years, we've heard a lot from people who've unearthed hidden treasures in Google Books: a crafter who uncovered a forgotten knitting technique, a family historian who discovered her ancestor once traveled the country with a dancing, roller-skating bear. The books they found were out of copyright and in the public domain, which meant they could read the full text and even download a PDF version of the book.

I'm excited to announce that starting today, Google Books will offer free downloads of these and more than one million more public domain books in an additional format, EPUB. By adding support for EPUB downloads, we're hoping to make these books more accessible by helping people around the world to find and read them in more places. More people are turning to new reading devices to access digital books, and many such phones, netbooks, and e-ink readers have smaller screens that don't readily render image-based PDF versions of the books we've scanned. EPUB is a lightweight text-based digital book format that allows the text to automatically conform (or "reflow") to these smaller screens. And because EPUB is a free, open standard supported by a growing ecosystem of digital reading devices, works you download from Google Books as EPUBs won't be tied to or locked into a particular device. We'll also continue to make available these books in the popular PDF format so you can see images of the pages just as they appear in the printed book.

To get started, just find any public domain book on Google Books and click on the Download button in the toolbar.

Of course, these public domain books weren't born in EPUB format--or even in digital format at all. Let's say you download a free EPUB copy of Treasure Island. You're taking a final step in a long process that takes a physical copy of Robert Louis Stevenson's book and transforms it into something you can download for your iPhone. The process begins with a book that has been preserved by one of our library partners from around the world. Google borrows the book from one of our library partners, much like you can from your local library. Before returning the book in undamaged form, we take photographs of the pages. Those images are then stitched together and processed in order to create a digital version of the classic book. This includes the difficult task of performing Optical Character Recognition on the page image in order to extract a text layer we can transform into HTML, or other text-based file formats like EPUB (if you're interested, you can read more about this process here).

Digitizing books allows us to provide more access to great literature for a wider set of the world's population. Before physical books were invented, thoughts were constrained by both space and time. It was difficult for humans to share their thoughts and feelings with a set of people too far from their physical location. Printed books changed that by allowing authors to record their experiences in a medium that could be shipped around the world. Similarly, the words written down could be preserved through time. The result was an explosion in collaboration and creativity. Via printed books, a 17th century physicist in Great Britain could build on the work of a 16th century Italian scholar.

Of course, it can be difficult and costly to reproduce and transport the information that older physical books contain. Some can't afford these works. Others who might be able to afford to purchase them can't unless they can find a physical copy available for sale or loan. Some important books are so limited in quantity that one must fly around the world to find a copy. Access to other works is only available to those who attend certain universities or belong to certain organizations.

Once we convert atoms from physical books into digital bits, we can begin to change some of that. While atoms remain fairly expensive, digital bits are on a trend where they become ever cheaper to produce, transport, and store. For example, providing every student in a school district with a paper copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet might cost thousands of dollars. Yet if those same students already have cell phones, laptops, or access to the Internet, then they can access a digital copy of Hamlet for just a fraction of the cost. Often times, public domain texts in digital form are more affordable and accessible to the public than their physical parents.

All of this of course assumes that a digital version of the book exists. I love going into work each morning knowing that we're working to convert atoms into bits and that by doing so, we hope to make knowledge more accessible. In a world where educational opportunities are often disproportionately allocated, it's exciting to think that today anyone with an Internet connection can download any of over one million free public domain books from Google Books. Who knows. Maybe some kid will read Treasure Island on their phone and be inspired to write their own great novel some day.

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Judging a book by its (pretty) cover

Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 2:49 PM

Posted by Guillaume Poncin, Software Engineer

Library books often contain beautiful drawings and illustrations. Unfortunately, their book covers can often be dark and plain, hiding all this wonderful content from unsuspecting eyes. Over time, we've tried a bunch of different approaches for getting better covers, for example, using the book's title page or recreating a simple book cover by featuring the book's title and author. Finally we hit upon an idea that we like -- why not surface the illustrations inside the book to be its front cover?



It all started from an experiment conducted by our product manager, Frances Haugen, a few months ago. Back then, we tried our hand at putting together a few book covers manually. We liked what we saw, and since then we've been refining our algorithms to automatically extract relevant illustrations to use, hence adorning a good fraction of the public domain books we've scanned with new, pretty covers.

Here are a few of our favorites:







Want to see more? One way is to show your search results in 'cover view', which you can do by clicking on the "Cover view" link on the upper right-hand side of the page. For example, see what turns up when you search for plants or Holmes.

We hope this brightens up your search experience on Google Books and helps you discover even more titles on our site. Read the full post 0 comments

Sharing Public Domain Books

Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 4:30 PM

Posted by Philippe Colombet, Strategic Partnership Development Manager, Europe

When we launched Google Books, one of our goals was to bring the world's lost literature back to life. Many older books which are out of copyright (so-called public domain works) have been languished in the difficult-to-reach corridors of the world's great libraries. If you are a student at Oxford or Harvard, you might have a chance to find and read them. If you live thousands of miles away or are a scholar at a local community college, it may be near impossible to do so.

The Internet offers a fabulous opportunity to begin to address this inequality. We've been partnering with libraries around the globe, including many institutions in Europe such as the Bavarian State Library or the Bodleian Library at Oxford, to bring these books online so that anyone can discover and read them. In addition, we want people to be able to find these books in places other than just on books.google.com. So we're in constant dialog with several prestigious cultural institutions, such as the Spanish National Library and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, in order to help as many readers as possible around the world search and read public domain books.

We're not only reaching out to libraries, but also to other technology partners. We believe in an open platform for accessing and reading books, and we're always open to discussing opportunities with technology partners who share our goals of making books more accessible and useful. Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that over a million public domain we've digitized would be available on the Sony Reader. We've also partnered with Barnes and Noble to allow users in the US to browse and download public domain books from Barnes and Noble's eBookstore for free.

Bringing the world's books online is a tremendous undertaking, and we're happy to be working with more institutions and partners to help achieve this. We're always looking for more ways to expand access to books, and we envision a future where people throughout the world will be able to search and access the world's books anywhere, anytime.

For more information about Google Books, please visit http://books.google.com Read the full post 0 comments

Bringing the power of Creative Commons to Google Books

Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 10:16 AM

Posted by Xian Ke, Associate Product Manager, Google Books

Today, we're launching an initiative to help authors and publishers discover new audiences for books they've made available for free under Creative Commons (CC) licenses. Rightsholders who want to distribute their CC-licensed books more widely can choose to allow readers around the world to download, use, and share their work via Google Books.

Creative Commons licenses make it easier for authors and publishers to tell readers whether and how they can use copyrighted books. You can grant your readers the right to share the work or to modify and remix it. You can decide whether commercial use is okay. There's even an option to dedicate your book to the public domain.

If you're a rightsholder interested in distributing your CC-licensed book on Google Books, you have a few different options. If you're already part of our Partner Program, you can make your book available under CC by updating account settings. If not, you can sign up as a partner. You can select from one of seven Creative Commons options, and usage permissions will vary depending on the license.



We've marked books that rightsholders have made available under a CC license with a matching logo on the book's left hand navigation bar. People can download these books in their entirety and pass them along: to friends, classmates, teachers, and so on. And if the rightsholder has chosen to allow people to modify their work, readers can even create a mashup--say, translating the book into Esperanto, donning a black beret, and performing the whole thing to music on YouTube.

In return, people who download these books agree to use the work only in ways specified by the license, like giving proper credit to the author on any remixes or further public distributions.

This is just the beginning of this initiative. As authors and publishers tell us which works they want to share on Google Books under CC licenses, we'll be turning on the option to restrict your search to books you can share. In addition, representatives of the Book Rights Registry intend to allow rightsholders to distribute CC-licensed works for free (pending court approval of the settlement).

In the meantime, a few authors have already made their CC books available for you to download on Google Books, including:

55 Ways to Have Fun with Google by Philipp Lenssen
Blown to Bits by Harold Abelson, Ken Ledeen, Harry R. Lewis
Bound by Law? by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins
Code: Version 2 by Lawrence Lessig
Democratizing Innovation by Eric von Hippel
Federal Budget Deficits: America's great consumption binge by Paul Courant, Edward Gramlich
The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
A World's Fair for the Global Village by Carl Malamud

We look forward to working with Creative Commons, authors, and publishers to bring even more content online for you to search, enjoy, and remix.

Update from the Google Books team: For those interested in dedicating works to the public domain, please refer to the CC0 FAQ for more information. We've updated this post to more clearly refer to CC0 as an option for authors and publishers. Read the full post 0 comments

Helping more people discover books across the web

Monday, July 20, 2009 at 4:13 PM

Posted by Larissa Fontaine, New Business Development Manager

At Google we've always believed in helping users discover more books, and that anyone, anywhere, anytime should have the tools to explore the great works of history and culture. Back in March 2009, we worked with Sony to bring people access to over 500,000 public domain books on the Sony Reader for free. Today, Barnes & Noble, the largest book retailer in the US, announced that they are making over a half million public domain titles available for free via Google Books.

Readers on BarnesandNoble.com and their various reading applications will now be able to search, browse, and access this collection of fiction, scholarly, practical, and entertaining books, preserved by some of the world's greatest libraries. Look for these titles throughout BarnesandNoble.com, as indicated by the icon show below:

This partnership and announcement is yet one more step towards fulfilling our mission to enable people to discover and read public domain books anywhere. Read the full post 0 comments

New ways to search within a book

Thursday, July 02, 2009 at 3:58 PM

Posted by Casey Ho, Software Engineer

At Google we want to make it easy for you to find the information you need. As such, we've made searching for passages within a book part of the core experience of Google Books.

Earlier this month we revamped the search experience to make searching inside a book easier. You can now view the context of a search result, sort results by relevancy or page order, and flip through results quickly while viewing the book.

Today I'm excited to announce one more addition to the experience of searching a book: search results in your scrollbar. Now when you search in a book, little hints will appear in the margin to indicate where you results are located. When you hover over one of these annotations, you'll get a quick preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to the associated page. Here I searched Aunt Mary's New England Cook Book for pie recipes:

Previously, it was difficult to get a feel for where results were located in a book. You could count the page numbers and make a guess, but that's hardly efficient. Now there is a strong visual display of result locations, and often clusters will form around particular chapters or passages. This will help you navigate more easily between pages which contain your search term.

These annotations will both make navigation between results quicker and help users jump to the correct result.

As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy searching!

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Explore a book in 10 seconds

Wednesday, July 01, 2009 at 9:00 AM

Posted by Diego Puppin, Software Engineer

In his 1979 novel Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter's night a traveler), Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a character, Lotaria, who uses an "electronic brain" to read her books. Her computer can read a book "in a few minutes", and show her all the words in it, sorted by frequency. In fact, Calvino was fascinated by the research of Mario Alinei, who in the late 1960s created Spogli Elettronici dell'Italiano Contemporaneo, an academic analysis of Italian literary masterworks (including Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno).

Alinei's team looked at words used in the Italian language over time, noting changes in their frequency. You can imagine how this work was done forty years ago: operators punching computing cards, a big mainframe computer being fed words overnight, and an encoded output that had to be typeset again into book form.

Now our computing infrastructure can do Alinei's work in a few seconds. Starting today, you'll find a cloud of "Common Terms and Phrases" on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

As with the other features on the Book Overview page, the word cloud is meant to offer a new way to explore our catalog. If you are trying to learn about Italian art, a search in our index will find many good books on the Renaissance period. Use the cloud of common terms to tell what each book is about. For example, The Renaissance is more focused on the "canon" of art (see the emphasis to beauty, Greek models, poetry of art), while Renaissance Art casts light on the role of patrons in the art scene (patrons, commission, family). After this 10-second glance at the contents, you can choose which book to study next. Happy reading!

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New Features on Google Books

Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 8:30 AM

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books

Think about how you use a book. You want to read it, sure--but there are a host of other ways for you to interact with the words between the covers. You might want to flip through the pages to find an image. You might want to open right up to the table of contents so you can find your favorite chapter. And you might want to pass it along to a friend so they can have a look at it, too.

Today I'm excited to announce that we're rolling out changes to Google Books that give readers and book lovers everywhere new ways to interact with the words and images contained within the books we've brought online. We've also made it easier for users to share previews of their favorite books on their blogs or websites. Here's a tour of some of the enhancements we've made to the way you search, browse, and share the books that we've digitized:

1. Embeds and links - This new toolbar option allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in any of your websites or blogs--all with a simple html snippet. It's a lot like the embed tag that makes it so easy to share YouTube videos. Programmers comfortable with API tools could accomplish this via our Embedded Viewer API, but this new solution is much easier for everyone to use. You can also choose to grab a URL link to email or IM to friends that takes them to the same book and page on Google Books. For readers, this means they can more easily share pages from books you love, while publisher partners can gain even more awareness across the web to promote their books.

2. Better search within each book - You've always been able to search inside books you find on Google Books. Now, for public domain and partner books, we've made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears. You can click on those images to navigate directly to the pages inside the book. You can also sort your search results by relevance in addition to page order in the book or magazine.

In the search results bar, you'll find 'Previous' and 'Next' buttons that allow you to browse through search hits quickly and easily.

3. Thumbnail view - Click on the thumbnail view button in the toolbar to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine. Clicking on a thumbnail image will take you to that page in the reading view (available for "full view" books).

4. Contents drop-down menu - Above the book itself, you'll find a Contents drop-down that allows you to jump to chapters within the book--or articles within a magazine. (In case you're wondering, we built this using the same structure extraction technology that supports our mobile version of Google Books.)

5. Plain Text Mode - We've made it easier to find our plain text versions of public domain books. If a book is available in full view, you can click the 'Plain text' button in the toolbar to see our HTML version of the text (derived via OCR for full view books). This is especially useful for visually impaired Google users, who can use this format for text-to-speech and other types of software.

6. Page Turn Button and Animation - In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen, even if you haven't yet finished the page. An animated line moves with the page turn to make it easier to keep track of your location in the text.

7. Improved Book Overview Page - On the Overview page you'll find an assortment of useful data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc.

We hope that you enjoy these improvements to Google Books. As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy reading!

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Barcode your bookshelf with Google Books

Friday, June 05, 2009 at 9:58 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

This week, a Google software engineer named Matt Cutts posted a great Google Books tip on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. Using a simple USB-powered barcode scanner, Matt shows how you can easily add your books from off your bookshelf at home to the My Library feature in Google Books.

To get started, simply follow the My library link when browsing on Google Books, then click on the Import Books link. Rather than type in the ISBNs by hand, you can use a barcode scanner to read and import the ISBN from the barcode on the back of each hard copy book in your collection.

Once imported, you can rate them and view these titles in My Library on Google Books. The real power of this tip? You can then use Google Books-powered search to browse just the books in you own home library. Check out the details in this video!

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1.5 million books in your pocket

Thursday, February 05, 2009 at 8:56 AM

Posted by Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen, Book Search Mobile Team

One of the great things about an iPhone or Android phone is being able to play Pacman while stuck in line at the post office. Sometimes though, we yearn for something more than just playing games or watching videos.

What if you could also access literature's greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain's hilarious travelogue, Roughing It? Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage.

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your iphone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.

There's an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you'll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone's small screen.

Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short). The following example demonstrates the difference between page images and the extracted text:

=> "Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson— which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. ...

The extraction of text from page images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books' pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text. The example below shows the page image from the original manuscript for Alice's Adventures Under Ground. In this extreme case, the extracted text is riddled with errors:

=> "lV~e.il!" .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve ...

Imperfect OCR is only the first challenge in the ultimate goal of moving from collections of page images to extracted-text based books. Our computer algorithms also have to automatically determine the structure of the book (what are the headers and footers, where images are placed, whether text is verse or prose, and so forth). Getting this right allows us to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book.

The technical challenges are daunting, but we'll continue to make enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction technologies. With this launch, we believe that we've taken an important step toward more universal access to books.

To try it out, point your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m and begin reading. Oh, and if you do bump into some rough patches where the text seems, well, weird, you can just tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text.

Happy mobile reading!

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Magazines come to Google Book Search

Tuesday, December 09, 2008 at 9:58 AM

posted by Punit Soni, Product Manager

Over the past couple of years, we've made an effort to bring specialized content like Patents, News Archives and the LIFE Photo Archive online. Today, that effort continues--we're beginning to add magazines to the Google Book Search index, so that when you search on Google Book Search, you'll be searching across the full text of both books and an ever-growing number of magazines, which will appear tagged with the keyword "Magazine" in search results.

Check out our post on the Official Google Blog to learn more.

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Search physical books with Android

Monday, November 10, 2008 at 12:14 PM

Posted by Jeff Breidenbach, Engineer, Google Book Search

My mom recently sent me a copy of The Last Lecture, a book based on the inspiring talk given by Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch a few months before he passed away. I particularly remember him starting the talk with push-ups; a poignant introduction to the topic of terminal illness.

The Last Lecture was one of the first books we tested on the Barcode Scanner application, a new searching tool available for download on Android-powered phones. Here's how it works: when you open up the application, the screen will show what the phone's built-in camera is seeing. When you line up the camera in front of a book barcode, it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN - without you even needing to click the shutter. As you can see below, you'll then have the option search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away.

Here, I'm searching for push to find all the pages that mention push-ups, and they're displayed below the search box.

For students, this could be an easy way to locate that critical passage that the professor was talking about in lecture. Or if you're browsing through the shelves of a bookstore, you could use this application to easily determine whether a book contains the information you're looking for.

This is the first release of this program, so there may be some hiccups. Most of the books supported by this tool were printed in the mid-1990s or later, because it took some time for ISBN barcoding standards to stabilize. And of course, not every book is on Google Book Search. Yet even with these limitations, it's a lot of fun to search through a paper book using your mobile device, and I think the tool opens up new ways to experience printed works.

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But where to start?

Thursday, October 16, 2008 at 11:00 AM

Posted by Frances Haugen, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search

One of the most exciting things about Google Book Search is that there are always new books to discover. But where to begin? When I first joined the Book Search team over a year ago, I started exploring the concept of "horizontal navigation" - in other words, finding new books which might interest you based on an initial book or set of books that you like. Since then, we've explored a number of ways to go about this, and today we'd like to announce the first fruit of those efforts: a new iGoogle gadget which allows you to manage your Google Book Search Library and receive customized recommendations based on the books you save, whether you're interested in DIY or molecular gastronomy (yum!).



As you might have noticed, iGoogle launched some new features today as well. With the release of canvas views (larger versions of gadgets), you now have more space to explore recommendations, or, once you've found a promising book, to preview and read books right inside the gadget using the new embedded viewer API. Your new favorite book could just be a click away.

Add this gadget to your iGoogle page:

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Book Search everywhere with new partnerships and tools

Monday, September 22, 2008 at 9:00 AM

Posted by Alex Diaz, Product Manager, Google Book Search

Today, we're taking a big step towards bringing more books, across more sites, to more people online.

We're launching a set of free tools that allow retailers, publishers, and anyone with a web site to embed books from the Google Book Search index. We are also providing new ways for these sites to display full-text search results from Book Search, and even integrate with social features such as ratings, reviews, and readers' book collections. By providing tools that help sites connect readers with books in new and interesting ways, we hope publishers and authors will find even wider audiences for their works.

What does this mean for readers? Well, since we've partnered with a number of booksellers to enable preview functionality for their sites, one way you may come across this feature is by simply shopping online for books. For example, suppose you've turned to the Books-A-Million site to look for a book on the history of your hometown (say, Mountain View, California). When you see a book that looks promising, you can now click on "Google Preview" to browse through the book just as you might in the physical store, without ever having to leave Books-A-Million's website.



As on the Book Search site itself, you can search within the book, zoom in and out on the page, and browse up to 20% of the book. And because Google Previews are supported by the same infrastructure as Google Book Search, publishers and authors gain access to a larger distribution platform without changing the amount of the book they display to any given individual.

This Google Preview feature is now live on retailer sites around the globe, from Books-A-Million to Blackwell Bookshop and The Book Depository in the UK, A1Books in India, Librería Norma in Colombia, Van Stockum in the Netherlands, and Livraria Cultura in Brazil. Over the coming weeks, this functionality will roll out to even more booksellers, including Borders.com, Buy.com, and Powell's Books.

Beyond these retailer partnerships, we've also worked with a wide array of sites and organizations to bring Book Search functionality to their users:

• Library catalogs. It is now possible to preview books—including a huge number of works in the public domain—right from the online catalogs of the University of California and the University of Texas, as well as through WorldCat.org, a service that lets you search across the collections of more than 10,000 local and institutional libraries worldwide.


• Publisher and author sites. The Arcadia Publishing web site has descriptions of its books about towns from Mountain View to Medford--and now, thanks to the Book Search integration, you can peek directly into these books as well. O'Reilly, Macmillan, Apress, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Stanford University Press have incorporated preview functionality into their sites, as well.


• Social book sites, which allow users to organize and share their reviews, ratings, and favorite books. You can now import your Book Search My Library collection straight into your aNobii account, or preview books within the weRead gadget for social networks. Be sure to also try out the exciting integrations by BookJetty, GoodReads, and BookRabbit.

Of course, we know that even more sites will also want to work with the Book Search index in ways we can't even imagine. That's why we've made these tools an open set of APIs, which anyone can use to build applications drawing on the unique search results and preview capabilities provided by Book Search. If you'd like to try out these APIs on your website, check out our brand new developer site.

Ultimately, we believe that these tools and partnerships further our quest to make books more discoverable on the Web, from your Google search results to your favorite bookstores, publisher and author websites, online library catalogues, and social networks.

Want to learn more about the many sites now offering Book Search functionality? Check out our Who's using it page. Read the full post 0 comments

Meditating on books

Friday, August 22, 2008 at 10:54 AM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

Hello again, and welcome to the Inside Google Book Search blog. We’ve been taking things slow lately, as summer slides by. But we’re not making excuses. Maybe while not blogging, we’ve been outside reading under the shade of a tree, or on the beach, where the rustling of pages finds its counterpart in the lapping of waves. Maybe we were too enthralled with Aleksandar Hemon’s latest book to pick up a virtual pen. Maybe we weren’t reading at all and were just lazing about under that tree. Would you begrudge us that?

I do think summer is the best time to read a book. Some might say it would be winter, because you’re inside so much, but I’m not so sure about that. Something about heat makes it even more pleasant to read: coldness demands motion, or at least bundling up, but the paltry effort required to turn a page is suited to a warm day.

Thoughts of this tone lead me think of the 14th-centry Japanese writer Kenkō. My favorite book of his, Essays in Idleness—actually the only one I know, but literary honor demands that I refer to it as “my favorite”—is a series of meditations about such simple things. He often reflects upon minute, later historical details of his time, people's behavior or, in this case, the pleasure of reading:

The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.

The concept of transience and impermanence runs through Kenkō’s work, but the book has been given a long life by other authors who have cited him. Here you can read all the instances of the above quote on Book Search. I would guess that Kenkō never imagined this blog-rebirth I have granted him, but he would know that as blogs become passé, antiquated and finally forgotten, he’ll still be there to be found by unknown friends. Read the full post 0 comments

U.S. copyright renewal records available for download

Monday, June 23, 2008 at 9:45 AM

Posted by Jon Orwant, Engineering Manager, Google Book Search

If I handed you a book and asked whether it was in copyright or in the public domain, you'd probably turn to the copyright page first. Unfortunately, a copyright page can't answer that question definitively -- at best, it could tell you when the book in your hands was published, and who owned the rights to it at that time. Ownership can change, though: rights revert back to authors, and after enough time has passed, the book enters into the public domain, letting people copy and adapt it as they wish.

So how much time is "enough"? It varies, often depending on the country, on when the book was published, and whether the author is living. For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.

How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.

There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today. These records are free and in the public domain, and we hope you're able to use them to determine the copyright status of books that interest you.

At Google, we're committed to making as many books available online to users as possible while respecting copyright, and this is one example of that commitment. Watch this space for more to come. Read the full post 0 comments