Inside Google Book Search is proving a fine blog. Today it posts a run down of the four ways you can view books on The four ways you’ll see books in Google Book Search. From the post:

Searching around on Book Search, you’ll see that we display books in different ways depending on the specific copyright status of each title. Given the status, we range from making the entire text of public domain books available to showing either small snippets or simply bibliographic details about in-copyright books. For books that authors and publishers have submitted to us, you can see a limited preview of the pages.

In my experience the second from closing paragraph is very true for Book Search:

Our goal is to to [sic] provide everyone with a good Book Search experience, while at the same time protecting the copyrights of publishers and authors. Some books may start out with no preview or in Snippet View, and later be shown in Limited Preview or Full View as we partner with the copyright owners or confirm that the book is in fact in the public domain. In the meantime, we’ll continue to be conservative in our display of the books in Google Book Search.

If anything Book Search has been too conservative often listing in snippet view books that really are out of copyright and safely in the public domain. Still it is good to see GBS finally pushing forward and making some noise about the reason some of its search results might be less than useful for searcher and readers alike.