Eoin Purcell

Biggest first I think
Bethany Poole, Product Marketing Manager at Google Book Search just posted this:

Fortunately for people like me, our engineers have a fix. With the launch of the My Library feature in Book Search, I can create my own customized library online, and quickly search my collection to figure out which book I’m looking for. Once it’s created, I can share my library with my friends and see what’s in their collections.

It’s easy to build a collection: simply follow these steps to add books to your library. Then you can organize your collection by adding your own labels, ratings, and book reviews.

I have uploaded a few ISBNs and tried out the MyLibrary service. You can see the results here.

Initial thoughts
It seems like a fairly nice little service, intuitive and fast too. It lacks the social features of LibraryThing and the resources of Amazon search too. The social features will no doubt come soon. I think if I was LibraryThing I’d be a little worried by this development. I can see too how this little service will facilitate a bigger product launch, the rumoured Full Book View that was mentioned today in the NYT.

As for the Popular Passages & BooK Clipping Launches
Popular Passages seems a sweet little add on. I wonder how happy with it publishers will be. It strikes me too that only a service like Google that has the whole book digitised will be able to do something like that. LibraryThing won’t for instance be able to provide a service like it. Nor for that matter will they be able to let you do this:

You can now highlight a section of text in any public domain book in Book Search, create a clip from it, and share it with the world. You can post your favorite clips to your blog along with a personal annotation, collect them in a Google Notebook, or share them with friends anywhere you decide to embed the link. Your clip looks exactly as it appears in the book, or if you prefer plain text, we have that too.

Of course you can do it with Exact Editions but not for magazines and books they don’t host on their system. And it is pretty cool (See below, a better time for the book trade methinks). All in all, Google have really taken a step up in their battle to dominate books online. If this is the first step in putting together an arsenal of tools it is a convincing one. What is more they are so clearly ahead of publishers it is almost embarrassing.

Impressed and slightly cowed
Eoin