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A new way to browse books
November 21, 2006
Posted by Nathan Naze, Software Engineer
As a kid, I was a bit of a fixture at my
hometown library
. My mom and I would visit frequently and the librarians knew me by name. It's only fitting that now, decades later, I work as an engineer for
Google Book Search
, Google's project to make the world's books searchable, just like the web.
My latest assignment has been to help develop a better way to browse our digitized books on a computer screen. I've always had an interest in cutting-edge
web applications
— existing Google products such as
Gmail
,
Google Maps
, and
Google Docs & Spreadsheets
make heavy use of
JavaScript
and
DHTML
to create full-featured applications in a web browser that you can use without having to download and install anything.
In an effort to make online book reading easier, we've given our product the same treatment. I'm tremendously excited to announce the first fruits of these efforts. Here's a quick tour of some of the changes:
Zoom in on text and images.
Here's
a cool full-page sketch of a ship
from an 1898 book on
steam navigation
. Looking for something less dated? Perhaps this
colorful page of a room
from
a book on interior design
. Want a better look? You can now zoom in and out — just click on the
and
buttons. Play with it until you find a size you like.
One book, one web page.
No more reloads! In one-page mode (just click the
button), pages appear one below the other, like a scroll of paper. For
full-view
books, there's also a two-page mode (
) in which pages appear side by side, just like in a physical book (perfect for
two-page images
). In both modes, you'll be able to use
and
to turn pages.
Scroll, scroll, scroll your book…
using the scrollbar or your mouse wheel, or by dragging (in most browsers, you'll see a
). You can also use the keyboard (try the spacebar, page up, page down, and the arrow keys). Or you can click on a link in the table of contents or your search results to jump right to that page (like
this photo
from the 1906 book
Geronimo's Story of His Life
).
This page was made for reading.
We've tried to tidy up the clutter to leave as much room as possible for what's important — the book. We've put all the information about the book in a scrollable side menu. Still not enough room? You can put the screen in fullscreen mode with
, so you can use the whole window for browsing. Try it with a nice illustrated book of
Celtic fairy tales
or, for some lighter reading,
electromagnetic wave theory
.
More on this (and other) books.
Find other books that interest you. Just click on "About this book" to find more books related to the book you're reading. If the book
How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains
interests you, you'll probably like
Comic Book Artist Collection, Vol. 1
. We also revised our "About this book" page to provide better information for in-copyright books, from which you can just see short snippets or a limited preview.
Explore citations and references.
You can also find other books that refer to your book of interest. If scholarly works from
Google Scholar
have references to the book, you'll see them too. As an example, see what other works have referred to
Aristotle's works
or the 1922 book
All About Coffee
.
So check out the new
Google Book Search
. We hope it'll help you find new (and old) books that interest you. Try it out, and
let us know what you think
.
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