Google Books has quietly been one of Google’s most interesting project to date. It has involved the scanning of millions of books (which has been a point of contention with book publishers) and allows users to not only read books but to search them, embed printed words, and even access them on mobile phones.
Today, Google launched a ton additional improvements. In an announcement, the Google books team revealed not one or two, but seven new features within their book-archiving service. Here’s what has changed:
1. Easier embeddability: Embedding books was possible before through a complicated Embedded Viewer API, but now it’s as simple as a YouTube snippet. Like so:
2. Better context with book search: When your’e doing a keyword search, you’ll see more of the context around it to better understand what you’ve actually found. You can also sort these new results by relevance and use “Previous” and “Next” buttons.
3. Thumbnails: There’s a new thumbnail book view!
4. New Contents Menu: It’s a new dropdown menu that allows you to jump to different chapters in a book.
5. Plain Text Version: Google says that this feature is meant for the visually impaired.
6. Page Turn Button: This feature reminds me a bit of the Kindle’s page turning features. It’s even animated.
7. Enhanced Overview Page: The overview page has information like reviews, ratings, tagged words, and more. Here’s one for the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell:
Overall, it’s a large collection of small feature upgrades that enhance the user experience. And user experience is one thing Google understands very well. With today’s update, books have become even more accessible.
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Google books reste un incroyable projet à suivre et dont on attends avec impatience l'arrivée à maturité. Un projet qui pourrait changer bien des façons (universitaire) de travailler. Je pense là bien sûr à la recherche, aux thèses mais aussi à l'éducation.