A new way to browse books

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.