Found: More books

Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 8:31 AM

Posted by Viresh Ratnakar, Software Engineer

I've read Good Night! by Claire Masurel about, oh, a thousand times.

That was several years ago, when my daughter, now eight, was a little baby. I read it to her every night.

I have an eight month old son now, and he has his own favorite bed-time book. A few months back one night, he wondered, "Ba bababba brrr?" I could see his point. "Yes," I admitted, "your book is not discoverable on Google Book Search." "Brrr? Bubbb!!?" he pressed on. Babies can be rather persuasive.

So, here we are then. Today, we can find my son's favorite book, Baby Cakes by Karma Wilson, using Google Book Search. And we can find libraries that have this book and many many more. This includes millions of books that we know about but that aren't yet online. Here are a few of my favorite ones:

Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
The Liar by Stephen Fry
The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Ervin Knuth

We would like to thank our union catalog partners worldwide for helping make this happen. This is another step in our joint efforts to help readers find the wealth in their libraries.

In addition to the libraries where you can find these books, the book reference pages that we provide often include reviews, citations, references to the books on the web and links to buy the books.

Because these books aren't online yet, you won't be able to preview or search the text. You may ask, why then are we adding them to the index? The answer is simple. We want all our users to be able to discover *all* books, to learn more about them and to be able to find copies wherever possible - online or offline.

"Doodada," my satisfied baby concurs.