Google Book Search Blog

New ways to search within a book

2009-07-02T15:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by Casey Ho, Software Engineer

At Google we want to make it easy for you to find the information you need. As such, we've made searching for passages within a book part of the core experience of Google Books.

Earlier this month we revamped the search experience to make searching inside a book easier. You can now view the context of a search result, sort results by relevancy or page order, and flip through results quickly while viewing the book.

Today I'm excited to announce one more addition to the experience of searching a book: search results in your scrollbar. Now when you search in a book, little hints will appear in the margin to indicate where you results are located. When you hover over one of these annotations, you'll get a quick preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to the associated page. Here I searched Aunt Mary's New England Cook Book for pie recipes:

Previously, it was difficult to get a feel for where results were located in a book. You could count the page numbers and make a guess, but that's hardly efficient. Now there is a strong visual display of result locations, and often clusters will form around particular chapters or passages. This will help you navigate more easily between pages which contain your search term.

These annotations will both make navigation between results quicker and help users jump to the correct result.

As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy searching!

Explore a book in 10 seconds

2009-07-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Posted by Diego Puppin, Software Engineer

In his 1979 novel Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a winter's night a traveler), Italian writer Italo Calvino imagines a character, Lotaria, who uses an "electronic brain" to read her books. Her computer can read a book "in a few minutes", and show her all the words in it, sorted by frequency. In fact, Calvino was fascinated by the research of Mario Alinei, who in the late 1960s created Spogli Elettronici dell'Italiano Contemporaneo, an academic analysis of Italian literary masterworks (including Calvino's Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno).

Alinei's team looked at words used in the Italian language over time, noting changes in their frequency. You can imagine how this work was done forty years ago: operators punching computing cards, a big mainframe computer being fed words overnight, and an encoded output that had to be typeset again into book form.

Now our computing infrastructure can do Alinei's work in a few seconds. Starting today, you'll find a cloud of "Common Terms and Phrases" on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

As with the other features on the Book Overview page, the word cloud is meant to offer a new way to explore our catalog. If you are trying to learn about Italian art, a search in our index will find many good books on the Renaissance period. Use the cloud of common terms to tell what each book is about. For example, The Renaissance is more focused on the "canon" of art (see the emphasis to beauty, Greek models, poetry of art), while Renaissance Art casts light on the role of patrons in the art scene (patrons, commission, family). After this 10-second glance at the contents, you can choose which book to study next. Happy reading!

Orwell: Author and Dishwasher

2009-06-26T00:16:00.000-07:00

Posted by Roland Lange, Strategic Partner Development Manager

George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair 106 years ago on June 25. He is most famous for his last book 1984- one of the most influential books of the 20th century and still blowing minds in the 21st- but rather than offer another high school essay on that grim masterpiece here on the Inside Google Books blog, we want to celebrate and re-introduce his awful but amazingly entertaining first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (among this blogger's favorite books).

Before there was Anthony Bourdain, Orwell blew the lid off the restaurant scene. Down and Out... is a fictionalized story of his life in the late 1920s as a dishwasher in Paris and a tramp in the classic sense of the word in London. As a plongeur he takes the reader into the kitchen of several prominent restaurants. The conditions he describes are not for the faint of heart, though you will read with absolute awe and not a little guilty pleasure. Owell tartly summarizes one of his employers thus:

"...I used to wonder whether there could be a worse restaurant in the world than ours."

Many people have had a subpar meal, but few expect that their meat or fish spent the night on the floor covered by straw! The book was originally published in 1933 and really tells it like it was. (And don't ask about the over-used bathwater in a charity house in London.)

Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Famous Facial Hair edition!

2009-06-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

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), 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 Google Books (). Then, simply take the Embed HTML code and copy and paste it in to your site or blog to add it.

This past April, I decided to cease shaving and see what kind of beard I'd grow if left to my own devices. After five longs weeks, all I'd managed was an unruly and wimpy beard and decided to shave it off. For my next attempt, I'm looking to Google Books for inspiration, and put together this collection of famous facial hair using the Share this Clip feature.

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

Major General Ambrose E. Burnside and the Ninth Army Corps by Augustus Woodbury

Nietzsche by Paul Elmer More

New Outlook by Alfred Emanuel Smith

A Complete Life of Gen. George A. Custer by Frederick Whittaker

Asgard and the Gods by Wilhelm Wägner

Anecdotes of the Medical World and Curiosities of Medicine by John Timbs

New Features on Google Books

2009-06-18T08:30:00.000-07:00

Posted by Brandon Badger, Product Manager, Google Books

Think about how you use a book. You want to read it, sure--but there are a host of other ways for you to interact with the words between the covers. You might want to flip through the pages to find an image. You might want to open right up to the table of contents so you can find your favorite chapter. And you might want to pass it along to a friend so they can have a look at it, too.

Today I'm excited to announce that we're rolling out changes to Google Books that give readers and book lovers everywhere new ways to interact with the words and images contained within the books we've brought online. We've also made it easier for users to share previews of their favorite books on their blogs or websites. Here's a tour of some of the enhancements we've made to the way you search, browse, and share the books that we've digitized:

1. Embeds and links - This new toolbar option allows you to embed a preview of a full view or partner book in any of your websites or blogs--all with a simple html snippet. It's a lot like the embed tag that makes it so easy to share YouTube videos. Programmers comfortable with API tools could accomplish this via our Embedded Viewer API, but this new solution is much easier for everyone to use. You can also choose to grab a URL link to email or IM to friends that takes them to the same book and page on Google Books. For readers, this means they can more easily share pages from books you love, while publisher partners can gain even more awareness across the web to promote their books.

2. Better search within each book - You've always been able to search inside books you find on Google Books. Now, for public domain and partner books, we've made it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book by showing you more context around the term, including an image from the part of the page on which it appears. You can click on those images to navigate directly to the pages inside the book. You can also sort your search results by relevance in addition to page order in the book or magazine.

In the search results bar, you'll find 'Previous' and 'Next' buttons that allow you to browse through search hits quickly and easily.

3. Thumbnail view - Click on the thumbnail view button in the toolbar to see an overview of all the pages in a public domain book or in a magazine. Clicking on a thumbnail image will take you to that page in the reading view (available for "full view" books).

4. Contents drop-down menu - Above the book itself, you'll find a Contents drop-down that allows you to jump to chapters within the book--or articles within a magazine. (In case you're wondering, we built this using the same structure extraction technology that supports our mobile version of Google Books.)

5. Plain Text Mode - We've made it easier to find our plain text versions of public domain books. If a book is available in full view, you can click the 'Plain text' button in the toolbar to see our HTML version of the text (derived via OCR for full view books). This is especially useful for visually impaired Google users, who can use this format for text-to-speech and other types of software.

6. Page Turn Button and Animation - In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen, even if you haven't yet finished the page. An animated line moves with the page turn to make it easier to keep track of your location in the text.

7. Improved Book Overview Page - On the Overview page you'll find an assortment of useful data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc.

We hope that you enjoy these improvements to Google Books. As always, feel free to provide feedback. Happy reading!

Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Outer Space edition!

2009-06-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

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), 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 Google Books (). Then, simply take the HTML and copy and paste it in to your site or blog to add it (or choose the option to send it to Blogger).

It's been an exciting few months for space enthusiasts, as the crew of the space shuttle Atlantis recently completed what will be the final repair mission on the Hubble Space Telescope. With outer space on my mind, last night I watched a recent talk on YouTube given at Google by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and then spent an hour perusing the incredible archives of the Space Telescope Science Institute.

This morning I decided to look back at astronomy texts from the pre-Hubble days of the 19th century. I used the Share this Clip feature to pull together this collection of space images. Simply click any image to read the original book source!

[Please note, some images and content may not be available to users outside of the United States.]

A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century by Agnes Mary Clerke

The Tides and Kindred Phenomena in the Solar System by George Howard Darwin

Concerning the Earths in Our Solar System, Which are Called Planets by Emanuel Swedenborg

Other Worlds Than Ours by Richard Anthony Proctor

Tract on Comets by François Arago, John Farrar

Saturn and Its System by Richard Anthony Proctor

Barcode your bookshelf with Google Books

2009-06-05T09:58:00.000-07:00

Posted by Ryan Sands, Google Books Online Team

This week, a Google software engineer named Matt Cutts posted a great Google Books tip on the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. Using a simple USB-powered barcode scanner, Matt shows how you can easily add your books from off your bookshelf at home to the My Library feature in Google Books.

To get started, simply follow the My library link when browsing on Google Books, then click on the Import Books link. Rather than type in the ISBNs by hand, you can use a barcode scanner to read and import the ISBN from the barcode on the back of each hard copy book in your collection.

Once imported, you can rate them and view these titles in My Library on Google Books. The real power of this tip? You can then use Google Books-powered search to browse just the books in you own home library. Check out the details in this video!

What's in a logo?

2009-06-01T19:18:00.000-07:00

Posted by Hicham Alaoui, Associate Product Marketing Manager

You may have noticed new logos on Google properties like Google News or Google Maps. As we said last week on the Official Google Blog, we hope these designs freshen our look and improve consistency among logos and product name formats across all Google sites. Today, our team is joining the movement with our own new logo -- and name.

The goal of our new logos is to streamline their appearance and improve consistency, so we've also taken the opportunity to streamline our name as part of this design, bidding a fond farewell to "Google Book Search" in favor of the shorter, sweeter "Google Books." Starting today, we'll be rolling out the new logo to all Google Books pages.

Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Old School Transportation edition!

2009-05-06T10:11:00.001-07:00

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 Google 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).

Today on the way to work I saw two different drivers piloting Smart Cars along the highway, and it got me thinking about how strange (but awesome) these cars look compared to the trucks and sedans I grew up around. When I got in to the office, I started digging around Google Book Search. Using the Share this Clip tool, I put together this collection of old school methods of transportation.

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

The Conquest of the Air by Abbott Lawrence Rotch

Forest and Stream Journal

Around The World On A Bicycle by Thomas Stevens

Saddle, Sled and Snowshoe by John McDougall

Elementary Equitation: Principles of Horseback-Riding by Joseph Michaël Thomas Barretto de Souza

Books Are Full of Visual Gems: Sea Creatures edition!

2009-04-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

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

From the Mailbag: Illustrating your point with a book

2009-04-16T10:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Drop Everything and Read!

2009-04-10T14:58:00.000-07:00

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!

The Bodleian's treasures, available to all

2009-03-26T10:44:00.000-07:00

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.

Discovering the world with Jules Verne

2009-03-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

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!

From the Mailbag: Blending books when you want them

2009-03-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Discovering where the movie magic began

2009-02-22T15:32:00.000-08:00

Posted by Xian Ke, Associate Product Manager, Google Book Search

The latest Oscar award winners will be announced today. What does this have to do with books, you wonder? More than you may think! Just as books provide a source of inspiration for our own lives, so do they inspire screenwriters, directors, and actors to craft award-winning motion pictures.

Let's take a look at the Best Picture Oscar nominees for this year. Can you tell how many of these nominated films are based on books? You might wish to phone a friend, but wait one moment.

With a sleuthing mindset and Google Book Search at your disposal, you can discover and dig into source materials for some of the world's most popular movies. Curious about the magical story of Benjamin Button, I typed in a quick query and found book results for a 1922 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. How intriguing!

As it happens, all of this year's Oscar-nominated films for Best Picture have some roots in books:

F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" from "Tales of the Jazz Age" was the basis for this year's eponymous film.
David Frost's account of his landmark television interview of Richard Nixon helped in scripting the Frost/Nixon.
Randy Shilts' biography on "The Mayor of Castro Street" is an acclaimed account of Harvey Milk's life, brought to the big screen this year in Milk.
Bernhard Schlink's novel about a woman's devastating secret was adapted to film in The Reader.
Vikas Swarup's rags-to-riches story, "Q & A" has touched the millions who've seen the film version in Slumdog Millionaire.

Now then, the richness of books and the mass appeal of movies raise that time-honored question: which is better, the movie or the book?

Regardless of your answer, it's fun to discover and indulge in the delights of each experience. So go ahead! Enjoy the stories however you wish, and let Google help you with both movie showtimes and serendipitous finds of books that you never knew existed.

Judy's classics continue to Bloom

2009-02-13T23:41:00.000-08:00

Posted by Inbal Drukker, Online Team

My bookshelves at my parents' home are filled with children's literature, and one of my favorite authors growing up was Judy Blume, who turned 71 yesterday. On a recent trip back home, I spent quite some time in my old room, reflecting on books that affected me most as a child growing up in Israel. Yet this visit was different from previous trips back home. I was thinking about these books not just as an adult but also as the parent of a newborn spending her first autumn at her grandparents' home. Which books will she be reading when she grows up? Will she join the family club of Judy Blume aficionados?

Looking back at my teen years, one of my favorite books was Blume's Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. I was in awe of her ability to capture the confusion, angst, and the whole range of emotions I was feeling in those crucial years. In Deenie and Blubber, I learned how important acceptance is, while Tiger Eyes taught me about coping with death. I was fascinated by the tense friendships in Just as Long as We're Together. And as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I connected on a very personal level with Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself which deals with antisemitism.

When my daughter turns 10, we'll share laughs reading Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge, and as she grows older I will introduce her to more of Judy Blume's work. As someone who cherishes her childhood books and who's helped preserve children's songs, I hope that generations to come will keep reading and learning from Judy Blume's classics. To Life, Judy Blume!

"The most important single work in science"

2009-02-11T23:04:00.000-08:00

Posted by Michael Williams, Bibliographic Evaluation Team Manager, University of Oxford

February 12th is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and 2009 marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work On the Origin of Species.

An important book on evolutionary biology, it created widespread interest for its controversial ideas that contradicted the leading biology theories of its day. Famously called "the most important single work in science" by scientific historian Bern Dibner, On the Origin of Species revolutionized modern scientific thinking and established Darwin as one of the most influential thinkers of all time.

Only 1,250 copies of the book were printed, of which 1,170 were for sale. Such was the interest in the work that it is believed that all available copies sold on the day of publication. Copies of the first edition are therefore very rare.

With Darwin's anniversary approaching, the Bibliographic Evaluation Team (BET), which is responsible for preparing Oxford University's material for scanning, wanted to make sure that an Oxford copy of On the Origin of Species made it online. There are two first edition copies within the University Library, so we arranged for the Plant Sciences Library copy to be scanned in late January.

While the book was only away from the library for a day, preparing the catalogue metadata took much longer. Thanks to the hard work of the BET and our colleagues at Google, you can now search and read the full text of this classic book online.

On the Origin of Species is one of many hundreds of thousands of Oxford University books now available through Google Book Search, and we look forward to bringing even more volumes online for scholars and enthusiasts alike.

Concerning Coraline

2009-02-09T14:42:00.000-08:00

Posted by Laura Harold, Book Search Online Team

"It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It's the strangest book I've written, it took the longest time to write, and it's the book I'm proudest of." - Neil Gaiman on Coraline

For US fans of author Neil Gaiman (and anyone who likes a good, creepy story), this weekend's release of the film version of Coraline was cause for big excitement. If you haven't read the book, it's a quick and satisfying read — a young-adult novel that's just as scary and fun for adults. Coraline tells the story of a little girl who opens a secret door in her parents' home which leads to a parallel world. At first, this escape seems like a dream come true, until she realizes that her "other mother" may not be as inviting as she makes herself out to be...

If this piques your curiosity, you can preview the book on Google Book Search and then buy it using the Buy This Book links on the right side of the screen. I spent some time last week reading more about Gaiman in a cool book I found called, "Prince of Stories," and then watched Gaiman's talk as part of the Authors@Google series (skip to about the 24:30 mark to hear him talk about the writing of Coraline - pretty fascinating).

The film adaptation was directed by Henry Selick, the man behind dark and awesome kid classics like The Nightmare Before Christmas and the film version of Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach. From the trailers I've seen online, the interplay of Selick's style of animated storytelling and Gaiman's fantasy world hints at a movie that might actually be as good as the book it's based on.

So, for all of us who love Gaiman works like Stardust (also recently made into a film), American Gods, and The Wolves in the Walls, this should be a great movie. Happy reading (and movie-going)!

1.5 million books in your pocket

2009-02-05T08:56:00.001-08:00

Posted by Viresh Ratnakar, Guillaume Poncin, Brandon Badger, and Frances Haugen, Book Search Mobile Team

One of the great things about an iPhone or Android phone is being able to play Pacman while stuck in line at the post office. Sometimes though, we yearn for something more than just playing games or watching videos.

What if you could also access literature's greatest works, such as Emma and The Jungle Book, right from your phone? Or, some of the more obscure gems such as Mark Twain's hilarious travelogue, Roughing It? Today we are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse while buying your postage.

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are optimized to be read on a small screen. To try it out and start reading, open up your web browser in your iphone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.

There's an interesting backstory about the work involved to prepare so many books for mobile devices. If you use Google Book Search, you'll notice that our previews are composed of page images made by digitizing physical copies of books. These page images work well when viewed from a computer, but prove unwieldy when viewed on a phone's small screen.

Our solution to make these books accessible is to extract the text from the page images so it can flow on your mobile browser just like any other web page. This extraction process is known as Optical Character Recognition (or OCR for short). The following example demonstrates the difference between page images and the extracted text:

=> "Because I made a blunder, my dear Watson— which is, I am afraid, a more common occurrence than anyone would think who only knew me through your memoirs. ...

The extraction of text from page images is a difficult engineering task. Smudges on the physical books' pages, fancy fonts, old fonts, torn pages, etc. can all lead to errors in the extracted text. The example below shows the page image from the original manuscript for Alice's Adventures Under Ground. In this extreme case, the extracted text is riddled with errors:

=> "lV~e.il!" .ÍAoHyU- AUte. U brstty/affc. su.it a. f o.tl as ~tk¿* , I s&O.IL .éfiiíjz tiotkun-) of-ttmlr1¿*y ¿i^n. sta¿rs ! Jfo» ura.ve ...

Imperfect OCR is only the first challenge in the ultimate goal of moving from collections of page images to extracted-text based books. Our computer algorithms also have to automatically determine the structure of the book (what are the headers and footers, where images are placed, whether text is verse or prose, and so forth). Getting this right allows us to render the book in a way that follows the format of the original book.

The technical challenges are daunting, but we'll continue to make enhancements to our OCR and book structure extraction technologies. With this launch, we believe that we've taken an important step toward more universal access to books.

To try it out, point your mobile browser to http://books.google.com/m and begin reading. Oh, and if you do bump into some rough patches where the text seems, well, weird, you can just tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text.

Happy mobile reading!

Happy Birthday, Virginia

2009-01-25T09:26:00.000-08:00

Posted by Ellen Cano, Book Search Online Team

“I was in a queer mood, thinking myself very old: but now I am a woman again - as I always am when I write.” – Virginia Woolf

Lately, I have reacquainted myself with many of the feminist writers of last century, those for whom my teachers always displayed admiration, or a keen critical eye. Today marks the 127th birthday of one of the most important modernist and feminist literary figures of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf.

To me, Woolf has always embodied the ideal of an independent woman years ahead of her time. This was evident in one of her famous non-fiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she analyzed and summed up the failed role of women in literary fiction. With this in mind, Woolf proposed a thesis that influenced generations of women to produce countless literary works: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

In the early 1900s, Woolf was a part of London's Bloomsbury Group, a loose organization of intellectuals (including John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Foster, and Roger Fry) who regularly gathered in the famous Victorian neighborhood of Bloomsbury.

While Woolf was influenced by the society that surrounded her, she employed an innovative writing technique, using fractured narratives and stream of consciousness to analyse the underlying emotion of her characters. This technique, emulated by many authors today, allowed her to fill her writings with visual impressions. When reading Mrs. Dalloway (1925), I can imagine how Clarissa Dalloway felt:

"In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jungle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June"

This is similarly the case with the Ramsay family in To the Lighthouse (1927), and also again in The Waves (1931). The Waves is a personal favorite of mine, and is considered by many to be Woolf's masterpiece, where six friends’ reflections make up the novel’s center surrounded by a wave-like atmosphere.

Although loved by many readers, critics of the writings of Virginia Woolf can be found in many books, magazines, plays, films and even blogs. Yet, no one can deny the influence that she has had on literature, not just on her own time but even today, as her works and life continue to be relevant.

“Lock up your libraries if you like, but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you set upon the freedom of my mind.” – A Room of One’s Own

Farewell, Google Catalog Search

2009-01-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

Posted by Punit Soni, Product Manager

In 2001, we launched Google Catalog Search as a demonstration of a new technology (called OCR if you're interested) that made it possible to search the full text of hundreds and soon thousands of product catalogs. In fact, we scanned them all ourselves in a small room (I think it might have been a closet actually) in one of our first buildings here in Mountain View. This was our first big effort to make offline information available online -- and we learned a lot.

For the Book Search team, Google Catalog Search is close to our hearts. Catalogs helped us better understand and refine the technology we use today to scan and make the full text of books available online. We also learned more about how users read scanned documents online, and how to best present this type of information to them.

It was a great experiment. Nonetheless, in recent years, Catalog Search hasn't been as popular as some of our other products. So tomorrow, we're bidding it a fond farewell and focusing our efforts to bring more and more types of offline information such as magazines, newspapers and of course, books, online.

Magazines come to Google Book Search

2008-12-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

posted by Punit Soni, Product Manager

Over the past couple of years, we've made an effort to bring specialized content like Patents, News Archives and the LIFE Photo Archive online. Today, that effort continues--we're beginning to add magazines to the Google Book Search index, so that when you search on Google Book Search, you'll be searching across the full text of both books and an ever-growing number of magazines, which will appear tagged with the keyword "Magazine" in search results.

Check out our post on the Official Google Blog to learn more.

Welcome, Bienvenue, Willkommen Europeana: the EU Launches Its Digital Library

2008-11-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

Posted by Santiago de la Mora, European Partnerships Lead, Book Search

Today, we learned of some good news for the promotion of culture and reading: the European Commission launched an important online project called Europeana. This European Commission effort creates a common access point to Europe's digitized resources. Over time, it plans to grow to include six million items, including film, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, newspapers and archives. The collection will include everything from the Spanish National Library's Beatus commentaries from the 10th century to the Greek National Library's original publications of Homer's epics and hymns to the Danish Library's portrait collection dating from the 17th century.

Digitization projects like Europeana send a strong signal that authors, publishers, libraries and technology companies can work together to democratize access to the world's collective knowledge. The more of these projects, the easier it will be for readers and researchers around the world to be able to search books and other materials that now are scattered throughout the globe and and difficult to access.

As we move ahead with Google Book Search, we look forward to finding new ways to collaborate on initiatives such as Europeana -- and taking part in what could become the biggest technological leap in disseminating knowledge since Gutenberg invented the printing press.

Search physical books with Android

2008-11-10T12:14:00.000-08:00

Posted by Jeff Breidenbach, Engineer, Google Book Search

My mom recently sent me a copy of The Last Lecture, a book based on the inspiring talk given by Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch a few months before he passed away. I particularly remember him starting the talk with push-ups; a poignant introduction to the topic of terminal illness.

The Last Lecture was one of the first books we tested on the Barcode Scanner application, a new searching tool available for download on Android-powered phones. Here's how it works: when you open up the application, the screen will show what the phone's built-in camera is seeing. When you line up the camera in front of a book barcode, it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN - without you even needing to click the shutter. As you can see below, you'll then have the option search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away.

Here, I'm searching for push to find all the pages that mention push-ups, and they're displayed below the search box.

For students, this could be an easy way to locate that critical passage that the professor was talking about in lecture. Or if you're browsing through the shelves of a bookstore, you could use this application to easily determine whether a book contains the information you're looking for.

This is the first release of this program, so there may be some hiccups. Most of the books supported by this tool were printed in the mid-1990s or later, because it took some time for ISBN barcoding standards to stabilize. And of course, not every book is on Google Book Search. Yet even with these limitations, it's a lot of fun to search through a paper book using your mobile device, and I think the tool opens up new ways to experience printed works.