Out of the blue, Google announced a new feature or rather a new tool for its Book Search Index, which would allow book retailers, publishers and practically anyone with a web site or blog to embed non-copyrighted books from the said index. Yup, you read it right folks, just like YouTube videos, we can now feature the full electronic format of books on our websites, for readers/visitors to flip through the pages of them books.
For books which are still under copyright, Google has partnered with some booksellers to have a preview functionality enabled in some of their book inventory. By clicking on the “Google Preview” link next to a particular book title, we can browse through that particular books to check whether it looks promising and a worth our reading time.
Since these books are part of the Google Book Search index, you can also search within those books, zoom in and out of the book’s pages and browse at most 20% of the book.Google has also made these tools available as APIs to allow developers work some more valuable applications out of it. These APIs are available at the Google Book Search developer site.
The Google Book Search Preview feature is now available various book retailers, library catalogs including that of the University of California and University of Texas and WorldCat.org, publishers and author sites, and on social book sites.
