Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Sea Creatures edition!

Wednesday, April 22, 2009 at 9:57 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Book Search Online Team

It may come as no surprise to the book nerds out there (you know who you are), but the annals of written history are full of visual gems.

When you come across something amazing in a public domain title scanned via our Library Project, you can simply snag the chunk of text or image using our Share this Clip feature in Book Search (). This feature allows you to click and select a section of text from a public domain title with your mouse. Then, simply take the HTML code provided and copy and paste it in to your site or blog (or choose the option to send it to Blogger directly).

After checking out photos of the incredible barreleye fish, deep sea creatures were on my mind today, so I used the Share this Clip feature to pull together this collection. Click any of the images below to view the original book source!

[Please note, some content may not be available in full view to users outside of the United States.]


Moby Dick by Herman Melville


The Fisheries Exhibition Literature by Phil Robinson


Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne


Shells and Sea-Life by Josiah Keep


The Fisheries Exhibition Literature by Phil Robinson

Read the full post 0 comments

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. Read the full post 0 comments

Drop Everything and Read!

Friday, April 10, 2009 at 2:58 PM

Posted by Roland Lange, Strategic Partner Development Manager

Sunday, April 12 is Drop Everything and Read Day (and, incidentally, author Beverly Cleary's birthday).

"Beatrice Quimby's biggest problem was her little sister Ramona." So begins the beloved Beverly Cleary's first book featuring Ramona, Beezus and Ramona. Many teachers and school officials would say that one of our biggest problems today is getting children to read. To help counter that, teachers and many other educational associations created an organization and a plan called "Drop Everything and Read!" For "D.E.A.R. time" at my children's schools, they literally drop their pencils, notebooks, textbooks, workbooks, and so on, grab a book, find a space and have some uninterrupted time to read. (I may ask Google HR if we can do the same thing here.) The sound of things hitting the desks and clattering to the floor can be rather loud.

Here at the Inside Google Book Search blog we want to do our part to promote this excellent effort and encourage every parent to take a moment and read a book to their children this Sunday. If you're having trouble figuring out what to read, try the Advanced Search feature on Google Book Search and play around to find the right book for you. You might search for "dragons, princes and princesses" in the Subject Category "fairy tales", or if you're a Curious George fan, try a search under Author for H. A. Rey.

Once you browse a few pages and figure out which book is just right, you can go to your favorite retailer (on- or offline) or find the book in your local library. Now, we can't help you devise voices for characters, but we do encourage you to pull out all the stops!

No need to limit this only to children either: This Sunday, let's make a loud noise, drop everything and read!

Read the full post 0 comments