The Bodleian's treasures, available to all

Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 10:44 AM

Posted by Ben Bunnell, Book Search Library Partnerships

In 2004, Google began a partnership with Oxford University Library to scan mostly 19th century public domain books from its Bodleian library. Five years on, we're delighted to announce the end of this phase of our scanning with Oxford, our first European partner. Together, we have digitized and made available on Google Book Search many hundreds of thousands of public domain books from the Bodleian and other Oxford libraries, representing the bulk of their available public domain content.

From English to German, to Spanish and French, most of the digitized works date from the 19th century and range from classic literature to more scientific volumes in fields including Geography, Philosophy or Anthropology. Among some of the works now available through Book Search, you can find the first English translation of Newton's Mathematical principles of natural philosophy from 1729, the first edition of Jane Austen's Emma, and John Cassell's Illustrated History of England. You can search and read the full text of these works on Google Book Search, and download and print a pdf if you wish to.

So, does this mean we are done?

Far from it! With most of Oxford's 19th century public domain works now digitized and available to users online, we look forward to continuing our partnership with Oxford to digitize more content as it becomes available and work together to bring more books to more people in more languages around the world.

"Library users have always loved browsing books for the serendipitous discoveries they provide. Digital books offer a similar thrill, but on multiple levels-- deep entry into the texts or the ability to browse the virtual shelf of books assembled from the world's great libraries," says Sarah E. Thomas, Bodley's Librarian and Director of Oxford University Library Services.

For more information on Book Search, visit books.google.com.

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Discovering the world with Jules Verne

Monday, March 09, 2009 at 11:28 AM

Posted by Inbal Drukker, Online Team

February marked the 181st anniversary of Jules Verne, a French author who often wrote of travel and exotic voyages. From a hot air balloon ride over Africa to a wild rafting adventure in the Amazon or an intrepid journey to the center of the earth, Verne's writings took readers to places new and unheard of. To visualize all of the different places described in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, one of Verne's classic novels, scroll down the About the book page to the map of places mentioned in this book.

Beyond setting his stories in foreign geographies, Verne also wrote about submarines, helicopters, airplanes and cars at a time when these travel vessels sounded like pure imagination. These and other forward-thinking elements in Verne's writings have made him remembered as one of the all-time greatest authors of speculative fiction.One of my personal favorite Jules Verne adventures is Around the World in 80 days, which foretells with uncanny accuracy the inventions and technology of the 20th century, and has become a literary stepping-stone for generations of science-fiction writers. In a sign of how this classic story still resonates with people to this day, on a recent visit to Israel I was thrilled and surprised to see an exceptional stage production of Around the World in 80 days in Hebrew.

Yet despite the global resonance of his works and the astonishing variety of geographic settings in his stories, Verne himself wasn't much of a traveler. Most of his boat trips remained within the boundaries of the Mediterranean sea, and he eventually had to stay home in Amiens after his leg was shot and injured, giving him a permanent limp. In his lifetime, Jules Verne published a remarkable corpus of 65 novels, 25 short stories and essays, three plays, and an opera libretto. For all of these adventures, thanks Jules!

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From the Mailbag: Blending books when you want them

Thursday, March 05, 2009 at 10:54 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Online Team

Welcome to another edition of "From the Mailbag," where we respond to emails from Google Book Search users. This week's message comes from Michael, who writes:

I love Google Books. [But] when I'm looking for a book and I do a Google search on it (a regular Google search, not specifically in Books), why doesn't Google "find itself"? Is it because it's in Beta? I'd rather have it pop up at the top of a Google Search as opposed to having to make a "special" search at books.google.com.

Thanks for the insightful question, Michael. Deciding which type of content to show in results for a specific search term is an interesting and challenging question. When you search for a term and a book is the best source of information, we want you to be able to find it easily.

Say, for example, you type "Shakespeare" in to Google. Are you looking for biographical details about the playwright, a picture of the man, videos of performances of his works, or to read and buy a copy of one of his works? This is the kind of challenge in ranking search results that is exciting for our teams to tackle.

When searching on our homepage, http://books.google.com, you are directly searching the text of over 7 million books. For searches on Google.com, we will blend books into search results when we think it fits the query. In fact, this blending of results in Google.com is the largest driver of book views and traffic.



If you search for a specific book on Google.com, such as The War of the Worlds, the cover of the book and a link to a Book Search result appears in the top results. Similarly, if you search Google.com for a specific author, such as Octavia Butler or Geoffrey Chaucer we'll provide you with a cluster of their books in your results. Book results also come up for general search terms when they are the best fit, such as "organizing your sock drawer."



On a separate note, the Google Scholar team also blends book results into their scholarly material search results. Google Scholar is a search tool for finding academic literature which is available and indexed online. Some of this content is found on Google Book Search, so for certain queries like "Albert Einstein," Google Scholar will show book results too.

We are continually working on better ways to surface relevant book results on your searches, along with new functionalities when viewing books on Google Book Search. Read the full post 0 comments