From yesterday’s Publisher’s Weekly email comes an article about Google Previews.

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature tied to its Book Search program, a widget-like tool called Google Previews. By adding simple code to their Web sites, publishers, retailers or anyone with sufficient technical knowledge can embed a Google-hosted preview of up to 20% of any book that has been included in the Google Book Search database.

Several retailers, including Books-A-Million and Blackwell Bookshop, have already enabled the service, and Borders and Powell’s plan to implement it soon. Google has partnership agreements with these retailers stipulating that the retailers will enable Google Preview for all books in the Book Search Index; in exchange, Google provides a more heavyweight version of the Preview software, with update and support, than is available to general Web site developers, according to Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships.

Widgets that embed book content into Web sites are nothing new—LibreDigital, and Ingram both offer similar services to their clients—but Google’s service is free and accessible to any publisher, or Web site developer, who would like to show a preview of a book in the Google database.

CNET also has a good overview.

I have a feeling that there’s some powerfully good ways to use this tool in school libraries.  There’s something about how this could help users know if a book out there might be right if we got it for them? Not sure.  The old brain is tired today — anybody want to take a stab at this?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.