Google took another step toward its vision of bringing more books online with the Monday launch of free tools that let retailers, publishers and Web site owners embed books from the Google Book Search index.
As part of its latest push to digitize the world’s books, Google has partnered with booksellers, libraries, publishers and social book networks to enable preview functionality for their sites. That means consumers may see more sites with features like Amazon’s “Search Inside” function as they shop online for new reading material.
“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,” Alex Diaz, a product manager for Google Book Search, wrote on the company’s blog. “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.”
Reading Around the World
Here’s how the preview functionality works: You visit the Books-A-Million site — one of Google’s new partners — to look for a book on the history of your hometown. When you see a book that looks like it might fit the bill, you can click on “Google Preview” to browse through the book in much the same way you would at a bricks-and-mortar store.
Just like on Google’s Book Search site, consumers can search within the book, zoom in and out on the page, and browse up to 20 percent of the book’s content for free. As Google sees it, because Google Previews are supported by the same infrastructure as Google Book Search, publishers and authors gain benefit from a larger distribution platform without having to offer any additional content to consumers.
In addition to Books-A-Million, Google has also signed on retail partners…