Download Books from Google Book Search

Google Book Search lets you download books, but only if they're in public domain, like Hamlet. All the other books are available as a limited preview or as a snippet view in Google Book Search.

You could download the image corresponding to each page of a book or you could automatize the process using a download manager. Another option is to use Google Book Downloader, a third-party Windows tool that downloads the pages from Google Book Search using several proxies and merges the images in a PDF file. Google Book Downloader will only retrieve the pages that are available online, so you won't be able to download entire books in most cases. The application requires .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 and it's not very clear if it breaks the terms of use for Google Book Search.

Embeddable Google Books

Google made it easy to embed in a site any book available at Google Book Search. You can add a fully-functional widget using this code:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
GBS_insertEmbeddedViewer('GkCpLIk7aisC',600,500);
</script>

where you should replace GkCpLIk7aisC with the corresponding book ID, which can be obtained from the URL. Here's the result for "David Copperfield" by Charles Dickens:

"As on the Book Search site itself, you can search within the book, zoom in and out on the page, and browse up to 20% of the book," explains Inside Google Book Search. The new widget is already used by online catalogs like WorldCat.org and social book sites like weRead to preview books.

This is just one of the three Google Books APIs that allow programmatic access to more than one million books.

Froogle Integrates with Google Book Search

After updating the listings for electronics, Google Product Search (previously known as Froogle) integrated the data from Google's book search engine. In addition to the list of stores where you can find a certain book, Google shows a summary of the book, the table of contents, references from the web and related books. There's also a link to Google Book Search, where you can preview and search inside the book.


In other book-related news, Panlibus points to Zoomii, a great visualization for Amazon's bookstore where books are placed in virtual shelves. If the products are more tangible, people are more likely to buy them, so Google should show more visual information: images, videos, trend charts, feature comparison etc.