Inside Google Books: January 2010

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 2:25 PM

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books

I'm happy to announce a few fresh features for Google Books. We've updated the home page by adding the ability to scroll through categories of books and magazines.

We also integrated the My Library feature into the home page to enable you to create and then share collections of books by adding them to "bookshelves." This new version of My Library gives you control over your collections by enabling you to keep some bookshelves private--if, say, you want to organize your own personal reading lists--while sharing others.

Previously, all books in your My Library were part of a single collection, and you could tag books with labels to organize. Now, instead of tagging a book with a label, you can add it to one or more bookshelves. As part of this transition to bookshelves, we're migrating all the previously created labels to the new bookshelf system. For example, if you had tagged a book with a label called "favorite travel books," then you'll now see a custom bookshelf called "favorite travel books" that contains the same book.

As always, you have full control over your book collection data. We continue to offer the Book Search API as a way for you to extract and edit your data. Ultimately, we also hope that these open APIs will make it easier to build product integrations that synchronize reading lists across devices and applications.

You can search and discover millions of books on Google Books. Our hope is that these new tools will make it easier for you to find, organize and keep track of the books that you're interested in reading.

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Tuesday, January 12, 2010 at 11:41 AM

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

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

When you come across something interesting in a public domain title that has been scanned via our Library Project, you can easily add it to your own website or blog. Simply snag the chunk of text or image using our Share this Clip feature in Google Books (

) and copy and paste the Embed HTML code onto your site.

It's hard to believe, but we're already a few weeks into 2010. For many folks, a new year means the creation of New Year's resolutions. Though I usually don't bother coming up with my own, I used January 1, 2010 as my excuse to get back to the gym. I was never much of an athlete, but so far I've stuck to my resolution to run a few miles a few times a week.

For a historical perspective on my little project, I went on Google Books and started digging up home exercise and workout manuals from the end of the 19th century. Turns out the fundamentals of weight training haven't changed much in 100 years, although I usually don't go running in a three-piece suit and handlebar mustache. I used the Clip feature in Google Books to collect these images and diagrams. Simply click any image to read the original book source!

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