Collect, share, and discover books

Posted by Adam Mathes, Product Manager

Books often live a vibrant life offline, and through digitization Google Book Search tries to help them live an even more exciting life online through full text search. Today we're launching some new features that go beyond search so you can collect, share, and discover new books.

To start, you can create your own personal collection on Book Search, and use it to help find just the right book from your collection for any occasion. Other people can view your library, so you can share your collection as Bethany has done. Or take a look at some other interesting collections.

Digitized text is useful beyond search, too. It enables us to infer connections between books through shared passages. For example, Sir Isaac Newton once said:

I know not what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

This quote has resonated and been used in hundreds of books from the early 1800s to 2007. You can discover connections between books through quotations like this in a feature we call "Popular passages." Read more and dive into the meme pool.

We've also launched a way to let users, select, copy and embed segments of public domain books (like the Newton quote) in any web page. We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as it is from any web page. Like many innovations at Google, a stellar summer intern worked on this .

We hope these new features help you discover, collect, and share some of the great truths just waiting to be discovered (or maybe re-discovered) in the great ocean of books before us.