Collect, share, and discover books
Posted by Adam Mathes, Product
Manager
Books often live a vibrant life offline, and through digitization
Google Book Search tries to help them live an even more exciting
life online through full text search. Today we're launching
some new features that go beyond search so you can collect, share,
and discover new books.
To start, you can create your own personal collection on Book
Search, and use it to help find just the right book from your
collection for any occasion. Other people can view your library, so
you can share your collection
as Bethany has done. Or take a look at some
interesting collections.
Digitized text is useful beyond search, too. It enables us to infer
connections between books through shared passages. For example,
Sir Isaac Newton once said:
I know not what I may
appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing
on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a
smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean
of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
This quote has resonated and
been used in hundreds of books from the early 1800s to 2007.
You can discover connections between books through quotations like
this in a feature we call "Popular passages." Read more
and
dive into the meme pool.
We've also launched a way to let users, select, copy and embed
segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web
page. We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as
it is from any web page. Like many innovations at Google, a stellar
intern worked on this .
We hope these new features help you discover, collect, and share
some of the great truths just waiting to be discovered (or maybe
re-discovered) in the great ocean of books before us.
Tags: , Adam, live, ManagerBooks, Mathes, often, Posted, product