Google today announced that it is adding magazines to its lineup for Google Book Search. These magazines include publications like Popular Science and New York Magazine, but also more obscure publications like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. In the long run, Google expects to add search results from these magazines to its main Google.com search results.

It is not clear if Google struck a deal with specific publishers to allow for this, but the selection of included magazines still feels a bit uneven and leaves out quite a few well known publications like Time, Newsweek, and Wired.

Read more: readwriteweb.com 

Labels: books, magazine, search

Seeking greater visibility for its Book Search engine, Google is making it easier for retailers, libraries and publishers to provide that service's capabilities on their own Web sites.

Via free code snippets and APIs (application programming interfaces), Google is allowing Web sites to display Book Search previews, most of which will allow potential buyers to browse up to 20 percent of a book's contents, Google announced on Monday.

Some retailers are already taking advantage of the program, including Books-A-Million, Blackwell Bookshop in the U.K., A1Books in India, Libreria Norma in Colombia, Van Stockum in the Netherlands and Livraria Cultura in Brazil.

Read more: pcworld.com 

Labels: books, search, sites, snippets, Web

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. - Big Ten Conference schools will digitize select collections in each of the university's libraries - up to 10 million volumes - as part of Google Inc.'s book-scanning project.

The partnership will speed up a digitization process that might have taken hundreds of years, school officials said in announcing the agreement Wednesday. It will result in a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly on Google.

The agreement covers Google and the 12 schools on the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, the academic arm of the Big Ten Conference. The schools on the committee include the 10 Big Ten schools affiliated through athletics - Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin - plus the University of Chicago.

Full article: ohio.com 

Labels: books, collection, school

June 4, 2007 · When Google announced in 2004 that it would digitize every book in the world, responses ranged from skepticism to outrage, as the publishing industry worried the project would hurt sales. But some publishers say Book Search has turned out to be a boon for them.

Read more: npr.org 

Labels: books, Publishers, search

Need to dig up some information from a centuries-old text on ayurvedic medicine? Soon you'll be able to do so from the comfort of your living room. Google has agreed to index and digitize 800,000 texts stored at the University of Mysore in India as part of its attempt to broaden the Google Book Search program, according to the Indo-Asian News Service.

"Written in both papers and palm leaves, there are around 100,000 manuscripts in our library, some dating back to the eighth century," said the vice chancellor of Mysore. "The effort is to restore and preserve this cultural heritage for effective dissemination of knowledge." He also added, cryptically, that the University plans to "patent them before making them available on public domain."

Full article: arstechnica.com 

Labels: books, library, manuscripts, university

Google went live Wednesday with a revamped Internet search engine that integrates video, books, maps and news into "universal" results to online queries.

Google spent two years transforming the architecture of its search engine to broaden results to include web pages that one had to previously seek out in separate search categories such as "photos" and "news."

"It's all the stuff on the web," said Google's vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer.

Read more: physorg.com 

Labels: books, images, Internet, Maps, news, search, video