Share and enjoy

Thursday, September 06, 2007 at 6:08 AM

Posted by Manas Tungare, Intern

"Share and Enjoy": It's not just the slogan of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in my favorite 5-book trilogy by Douglas Adams; it's also a good way to describe a new feature in Google Book Search.

When Google began scanning books from various libraries and academic institutions, it did so with the goal of preserving and making available online the enormous archive of knowledge humanity has built. Books are great and we'll never be able to improve on some aspects. But Google Book Search brought Google's forte, searching, to books. In addition, the Web lets us do much more in terms of linking, sharing, and aggregating all types of information, so we decided to combine these two advances to allow you to do other things you can't easily do with physical books. While it is easy to share links, photos, videos, and opinions on the Web, sharing books with your friends online used to be tough -- and tougher even, to share individual clippings from a book. This summer, I worked with the Book Search team to add clip-sharing features to Google Book Search.

You can now highlight a section of text in any public domain book in Book Search, create a clip from it, and share it with the world. You can post your favorite clips to your blog along with a personal annotation, collect them in a Google Notebook, or share them with friends anywhere you decide to embed the link. Your clip looks exactly as it appears in the book, or if you prefer plain text, we have that too.

So if you're writing a blog post or in a Notebook about the Renaissance, you can now quote straight from books on the topic: like this one, about Leonardo da Vinci:



Get started by clicking on the clip icon (). Share and enjoy!