Google Book Search, the most disputed service which has archived millions of books into digital format, on Monday took a big step seeking greater exposure for its Book Search engine, has introduced a cool update that lets anyone embed entire books, or just book previews, making it easier for retailers, libraries and publishers to provide that service’s capabilities on their own Web sites.
Developers can now easily take advantage of the recently added set of APIs to insert a preview of The Da Vinci Code or the complete encyclopedia on Diabetes onto external websites.
This indicates that “anyone with a Web site” can embed books from the Google Book Search index, and display full-text search results from Book Search, writes Alex Diaz, product manager of Google Book Search.
Web sites can also embed book ratings, reviews and readers’ book collections, besides it is also a great way to drop entire public domain works onto your blog in case you want to give your visitors something more exciting to flip through than your latest ramblings.
According to Google, this is mainly intended for online retailers and educational institutions, although the service is available to everyone. Publishers and retailers can now create easy-to-navigate previews of their content which can lead to users purchasing the books.
Google has already partnered up with a large number of bookstores, libraries, and social book sites for this new service. Amazon, of course, already has a partnership with Google and has included book preview functionality on its site since 2003, but thanks to this new feature of Google Books, any vendor can now add book previews to their sites for free.
The new Google Preview feature is now live on retailer sites around the globe. Among the launch partners that includes a diversified number of international online bookstores, 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.
And, others in the U.S. are planning to incorporate the Book Search functionality include Borders.com, Buy.com, and Powell’s Books will start implementing previews in the new few weeks. Besides, numerous university libraries have also started to add book previews, including the University of Texas and the University of California. You can view all of Google’s new partners here.
Google through an earlier API provided very inadequate Book Search functionality, but the current one offer external Web sites more and richer functionality and is simpler to implement, said Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships, in an interview.
“Formerly we had publishers that put the [Book Search] preview on their site on a one-off basis. This goes back 12 to 18 months. Now, since we have automated the whole preview process with the APIs, that creates a real industrial strength vehicle,” Turvey said. “We can add features and functionalities to the API and it can affect everyone simultaneously.”
Google is providing the Book Search tools and functionality free, and is neither generating any money from book sales commissions nor advertising, according to Turvey. The main benefits for Google are broader exposure of Book Search and a strengthening of its book publisher partnerships, he said.
For book lovers and scholars alike, the benefits is having access at non-Google sites to the Book Search functionality, including being able to browse some of the book and search inside it.
Beyond these retailer partnerships, we have 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: Allows 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.
Interested in embedding books? Then check out the preview wizard that will help you extremely well. Here’s how.