Mountain View, California — Google Books, one the most popular and controversial platforms to browse through books, read them online and even download them. With millions of titles available and keeps growing, the search giant realized the need for a good interface to find what you need and has just rolled out a revamped Google Books homepage and also introduced a couple of new features to provide a smoother navigation and browsing experience.
The revamped homepage now demonstrates several categories of books including interesting, magazines, classics, medical, cooking and others. Each window displays a horizontal scrolling frame that enables you to jump to more titles by a single click, without reloading the page.
“I’m happy to announce a few fresh features for Google Books. We have updated the home page by adding the ability to scroll through categories of books and magazines,” Brandon Badger, product manager for Google Books, wrote. The homepage now lists several categories, grouping books with similar topics or the ones which are the most popular at any given time. Categories include “Interesting,” “Magazines,” “Classics,” “Games,” “Cooking” and so on.
Users can now scroll through many new features of “My Library” feature integrated into homepage that lets you control over your library collection that is now divided into tabs such as favorites, reading now, to read, have read and reviewed enabling you to keep some bookshelves private–if, say, you want to organize your own personal reading lists–while sharing others.
This new feature migrates all the previously employed labels feature. If you used labels before, they are now automatically converted into bookshelves. For example, if you had marked a book with a label called “favorite travel books,” then you will now see a custom bookshelf called “favorite travel books” that contains the same book.
All in all, the revamped feature themselves are a welcome addition, but the timing of the update is interesting for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, Apple has just unveiled its iPad tablet which has books and magazines as one of its main draws. On the other hand, the deadline for any objections to the revised Google Books settlement with authors and publishers is looming.