The feature was announced back in May at Google’s Searchology event, along with a number of other things. In some ways, it is similar (though certainly not the same) to Bing’s interface. It gives you different categories for searches that affect your results.

Search options give users the ability to narrow results down to specific categories like videos, images, forums, reviews, and now books and magazines. "This will provide easier access to books and magazines by letting you slice and dice your results with certain characteristics," says Google in a post on the Book Search blog. "For example, you can now search for only books or magazines or for only content that you can preview in Google Books."

Right now, Book Search is only available in Search Options in the United States.

For a look at how Google came up with the user experience and design of "search options" check this out. If you want some advice on how to optimize for listings within search options, read this.

Books on this version have been optimized to be read on small screens, which is not the easiest thing in the world to do. A post by the Google Book Search Mobile Team explains the process a bit:

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).

Unfortunately, this system is not entirely perfect, and plenty of mistakes are bound to turn up. Things like smudges, torn pages, or even obscure fonts can throw up the OCR. The team provides this example from Alice’s Adventures Under Ground:

The text the OCR came away with was:

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

Obviously that is going to be a problem to readers. However, when readers come across issues like this, they can simply tap on the text to see the original page image for that section of text, so hopefully it won’t be too big a hassle. If these errors occur frequently though, readers are likely to give up and just find something else to read, or find the content elsewhere. All of that said, iPhone and Android users should be happy to have a free library of literature at their finger tips.

If future scholarly works show up in Live Search, it won’t be due to any extra work on Microsoft’s part. The company announced it planned to shutter the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, senior vice president for search, portal and advertising at the company, said on the Live Search blog how the current sites would be pulled offline next week.

“Books and scholarly publications will continue to be integrated into our Search results, but not through separate indexes,” said Nadella.

The projects digitized 750,000 books and indexed 80 million journal articles. “Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries,” Nadella continued.

Doing this also removes Microsoft from the line of fire regarding the copyrights of published works. By limiting their spidering to content posted by publishers and libraries, the onus of determining proper ownership and rights falls to those who create such repositories.

In contrast, Google has been in hot water with publishers and authors, who allege financial losses will happen from the scanning of books that have been long out of print. Google thinks its book scanning falls under the same kind of fair use that permits it to index websites without seeking the permission of the site owner first.

A year-over-year rise in visits of 73 percent would be good by most standards; books.google.co.uk accomplished that in just four weeks, according to Hitwise.  UK visits to the .com equivalent decreased during the same period, so the move wasn’t a total sweep, but it’s still noteworthy.

 Google Book Search Traffic

Robin Goad writes, "[V]isits from Google Scholar have increased, and the site has become the second largest driver of upstream traffic after Google UK.  This shift in sources of traffic may also be responsible for the changing demographic profile for the website.  Visits from users within the 55+ age bracket have increased by 53% since Oct 2007, while at the same time visits from the 35-44 age bracket have decreased by 45%."

Finally, it seems that Amazon should be thankful for all these recent changes; a reasonable amount of traffic headed straight from Google Book Search to its UK and US sites.  And this occurred, of course, even though Google sometimes makes full texts available.

It’ll be interesting to see how far these trends extend.  Google may well tweak, or at least promote, its API in an attempt to magnify the effect.

 Library, Google Join Forces For Curious George

On the Official Google Blog, Frances Haugen and Matthew Gray outlined an example of the API’s usefulness.  "[C]heck out the Deschutes Public Library in Oregon, which has added a link to ‘Preview this book at Google’ next to the listings in their library catalog."

And this means library patrons can save themselves from wandering up and down aisles in search of something they won’t actually want or need (e.g., a research paper with a promising title but a ridiculous number of typos).

Of course, there are several limitations to the technology; for starters, it won’t show more (or less) of featured texts than Google Book Search has in the past.  Also, Tim Spalding, a representative of LibraryThing, writes, "Google data loads after the rest of the page, and may not be instant.  Because the data loads in your web browser, with no data ‘passing through’ LibraryThing servers, we can’t sort or search by it, and all-library searching is impossible."

Still, use of the Books Viewability API isn’t mandatory; as libraries and other entities pick up on it, this’ll generally be a sign that they’re growing fonder of Google.

We contacted Gary Price, whose knowledge and experience in library matters enlightened the topic greatly. He commented to some extent on the matter on his Resource Shelf blog, after a brief chat with WebProNews.

In brief, there are many digitization projects in place. No one organization should be able to control the playing field. Some efforts predate Google and the OCA’s forays into scanning.

Gary expressed surprise that the Times made no mention of Project Gutenberg, which has been digitizing content since 1971 (36 years for those scoring at home.) He also mentioned the Online Books Page at the University of Pennsylvania, listing over 25,000 books.

“It’s one thing to scan books, but another to make them ‘findable’,” said Gary. Digitization is just one point in the process. Organization and quick access pose significant challenges, too.

Even with its resources and skill, Google can’t become a chokepoint for public domain works, due to the duplication of efforts that have taken place. Gary offered World Public Library, an aggregator of 500,000 works, as another example of why fears of Google Book Search could be greatly exaggerated.

Google Book Search Gets Commendable UI Update

“We offer a sampling of ‘Interesting books’ that are dynamically selected by Book Search’s algorithms, ‘Classics’ which point to popular books available in public domain, ‘Highly cited’ books which have books for scholarly users and ‘Random subjects’, which showcase books from a selected subject,” stated Pramod Sharma and Garima Sahai, two software engineers, on the Inside Google Book Search blog.

On the whole, this approach leads to a rather scholarly selection.  Yet the “The Indian in the Cupboard,” a childhood favorite of mine, showed up in the course of hitting “refresh” a few times, and the pair of Googlers later continued, “We’ve also added subject links in a left navigation bar as additional entry points into the index.  You can use them to browse books by topic or combine a keyword with the new subject operator to find books that match searches like Garima’s quest to find literature set in California or my hunt last night for a book on dinosaurs for my 7 year old nephew.”

The new update to Google Book Search has made the site much more user-friendly, and is the sort of thing that (in a positive way) can eat up a lot of time.  As a result, it’s likely to earn the service a lot more fans.

Hat tip to Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen.

Granted, not every suburb is going to show up in this layer, but then again, it’s hard to hop in the car and scope out Singapore.  Call it a happy medium, then, that “[n]ow when you turn on the ‘Google Book Search’ layer in Google Earth . . . you’ll see small book icons scattered around the globe.  When you click on one of the book icons, a pop-up balloon will display a snippet of text from one of Book Search’s public domain books that references that location.”

As Brandon Badger, a product manager, stated on the Google LatLong Blog, “You’ll also find links to the Google Book Search page for that snippet so that you can learn more about what it has to say about the city or town.”

If this development sounds familiar, that’s because a similar integration occurred between Google Book Search and Google Maps about seven months ago.  And Matthew Gray’s “Earth viewed from books” isn’t entirely unrelated, either.  MG Siegler writes, “Now they just need to do the big integration: melding Google Maps and Google Earth into one all-encompassing web app.  Of course I’m hoping they wait until the state of American broadband is a bit better . . .”

In the meantime, at least Google Earth is somewhat improved.

“We at the Google Book Search blog would be remiss if we did not address the most significant event in book publishing in the last 50 years: the release of the final book in J.K. Rowling’s excellent Harry Potter series,” writes Roland Lange, Strategic Partner Development Manager, on the Inside Google Book Search Blog.

Lange goes on to discuss several different matters, and I’ll warn you right now: if you haven’t read the last book, clicking on some of his links may not be a good idea.  (As one of the 42 people who haven’t yet gotten around to it, I’m afraid to click on much of anything.)

“Although the full text of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows isn’t searchable online, you’ll find lots of information about it on our ‘About this Book’ page, including links to book reviews and web references from diverse sources like the BBC and a host of HP fan sites,” he states.

Others links lead to various books and movies that might intrigue the Potter posse – those look pretty safe.  All in all, it’s just interesting to see Google express its interest in this publishing phenomenon.

“Google will unveil a new marketing tool . . . as part of the Google Book Search Partner Program,” reveals The Book Standard’s Kimberly Maul.  “The program, which will allow publishers to put a co-branded Google Book Search tool on their websites, is free if a publisher is part of the partner program.”

After a brief explanation of how the tool will work (Search Engine Land’s Barry Schwartz, who first found Maul’s post, also provides worthwhile details), something truly interesting came up: a quote from Patrick Durando of McGraw-Hill.

“We’re embedding Google Book Search onto our website,” said Durando.  “[It gives] our customers a quick and easy way to sample our content and see if this book is right for them.”

It’s all fine and well that McGraw-Hill would work something out with Google.  But earlier today, the publisher was involved in another book project: Microsoft’s Live Search books.  There’s nothing illegal here, of course, but it’s interesting to see this major company in agreements with both Microsoft and Google.

Let the rivalry continue, then.  It looks as if we all stand to benefit from it.