From the Mailbag: Illustrating your point with a book

Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 10:49 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Online Team

Welcome to the latest edition of "From the Mailbag," where we respond to emails from Google Book Search users. This time our question comes from Dave:

I want to make a website on the Underground Railroad. I know that Google Books has a wealth of information from public domain books. Is there an API link for your books with that content?

Thanks for this great question, Dave. Helping users and researchers take advantage of the growing corpus of books and materials on Google Book Search is an important goal for our team. With this in mind, we offer tools that we hope will spark your creativity and let you interact with books in new ways.

As we posted earlier, Google Book Search offers a number of ways to allow retailers, publishers, and anyone with a web site to embed books from the Google Book Search index.



For users like Dave with a personal site where they'd like to include a book in their discussion of a topic, we offer a simple Preview Wizard. With a few clicks and customizations, you can easily add book previews right to your own site. Options include an embedded or popup book viewer, or buttons linking to Google Book Search. Fill out the Preview Wizard's fields and then simply paste the HTML code onto your page.

If you are more familiar with website design (or have a helpful webmaster), we also offer a full Developer Guide, which includes customizable options for advanced users.

Folks trying out the API can ask questions and look for tips from other users at our Google Book Search APIs Help Forum.

While not an API, we also continue to offer a function to clip and share content from public domain content in Google Book Search on your site or blog. For public domain content, simply click the () icon, highlight a section of text, and copy and paste that HTML snippet into your site.

It should look something like this:

The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom by Wilbur Henry Siebert, Albert Bushnell Hart

We're excited to see how you use these features.