Google's Popular Passages

Yet another Google Book Search update...

Just discovered a new feature called "popular passages" where Google Books will list passages in a a book that have been quoted in other books and link to the texts in those other books. A neat tool for understanding how older books especially have been received. Search "Democracy in America" for an example.

Google's Mylibrary

Google's Book Search now has a "My Library" option. Google describes this feature:

You can now create personalized libraries on Google Book Search where you can label, review, rate, and of course, full-text search, a customized selection of books. These collections will live online and be accessible anywhere you can log in to your Google account. Once you've built a collection, you can share it with friends by sending them a link to your library in Google Book Search. You can even set up RSS feeds with friends so that they're alerted when you add new books to your collection.

Wired claims this is Google's attempt to compete with Librarything and Shelfari. The wired article claims the big advantage that Google has over those services is that you can search books in your library to find specific quotes etc. However it currently lacks a lot of the social networking features that makes Librarything so interesting (and fun).

It will be interesting to see if Google tries (and is able) to harness the wisdom of the online crowd to improve searching for books, to add new books and editions to its database, and/or to improve the quality of its scanned images. If individuals would take ownership of the books in "their library" they may be willing to work on improving the metadata and the actual data. If Google could harvest these efforts there could be great utility and profit in it.

Google's My Library also seems consistent with announced plans to start charging for full text of some copyrighted work (see this for example). Perhaps we will be able to create a personalized library of full text that we've paid for.

Ebook news

The New York Times ran an article yesterday on new developments in the ebook world. Although the article takes a very skeptical tone - comparing ebooks to flying cars and video phones, it seems to me that the day of ebooks may be coming sooner rather than later.

The article reports that Amazon is going to start to market an ebook reader that with a wireless connection to Amazon.com. Now there are a lot of ifs but if the book selection is sufficiently large (and this is Amazon so it should be) and if the cost per the ebook is sufficiently low and finally if the screen is actually adequate for long periods of reading. I could imagine wanting to buy this reader. Being able to browse and select books from Amazon and read them instantly would be a draw.

The second bit of news is that Google is preparing to start charging to view full text of copyright works in their Googlebook database. This as yet to be paired with a mobile reader but the sheer quantity of books on Google makes it seem likely that someone will try to find a way to allow people recreational access to those digital texts. A device with adequate screen resolution that could instantly access and display any book in the Google book database even for a small price would probably be pretty popular.

New and Improved Google Books

Google announced (and also here) last Thursday that they now are including information on books that they haven't digitized in their book search results. Although I couldn't find hard numbers, the Inside Google Book Search blog claims that it is millions. I have noticed the results when searching Google books. Titles that previously only showed up at the bottom of the results page under "Search Library Catalog" are now integrated with the other results.

The Google library blog mentions that Google is working with 20 different union catalogs and other third party metadata sources. In at least one case the Google books record is more accurate then the Worldcat record (though I've asked for a correction to be made in OCLC). In addition to the usual title, author, publisher, some of the Google records also include summaries (I assumed supplied by the publisher) of the content.

Google Books and Google Maps

It is interesting to think of the things you can do if instead of a bibliographic record containing metadata about an information resource, it actually contains all the contents of the information resource.

One thing Google is now doing with its expanding collection of scanned books is creating maps on the search result page that highlight all the locations mentioned in the book. See the bottom of this page for an example. As Lorcan Dempsey points out this system is far from infallible (for example giving a map of St. Augustine, Florida when the book references the Bishop of Hippo not the city named after him). However, when it works it could be a very helpful way to evaluate the book.

Notice each marker on the New York map in the linked example contains the context from the book where the location was mentioned. I'm guessing this is only the beginning of creative uses of the scanned data. Has anyone actually found features like this in Google books or similar collections helpful?