New Google Book Viewer

Google has launched a new version of its book viewer in Google Book Search. See their take on the chances in the Inside Google Book Search blog post.

You will only notice this once you click on a result, and in particular on a Full View or Limited Preview result. The Snippet view has changed a bit with the addition of 'Key words and phrases' at the top and a 'Contents' section and some other additional information depending on the book record.

But take a look at a Full View or Limited Preview record to see significantly more differences. The left frame lets the reader scroll down from one page to the next without clicking on a next page link. Google has finally added a zoom option. Many records also have a list of 'Related Books.'

Let's take a look at some of what's new. Here are some shots of a book in Snippet View, although many of these features are also available in Full View and Limited Preview.

The Summary section includes "Key Words and Phrases." The basic bibliographic information about the book is displayed better than in the old interface with the authors listed along with publication date, publisher, and in this case, an ISBN and subject terms. It is unfortunate that it is not quite complete enough for most citation styles, since it does not include the publication location. The title and authors are also often available above the summary.

Then we have the Contents portion which is not the table of contents. It seems to be an algorithmically generated table of contents which only shows a few sections since Google does not have the publisher's permission to reproduce the table of contents. I find it of limited use, especially in this example that does not display the other 85 sections!

The new related books section (no explanation yet that I've seen explains how the relationship is calculated) list several other books within Google Books. For more academic books, there may also be sections for "References from scholarly works" and "References from books." The former consists of links to Google Scholar (including some books) while the latter is just other books in Google Books.

Further down the page, we have the actual snippets below a Search in this Book search box. That first snippet has no visible words! I barely see the search term in the second. While Google tries to argue that this snippet view protects them legal from violation of copyright, it rarely offers much useful information to a searcher. With this no layout, the snippets are pushed down below the fold. By minimizing the frustrating snippet view and pushing other information about the book higher on the page, I assume the intent is to offer viewers more helpful information about the book.

The full viewer, available for Full View and Limited Preview records, can be seen in the image above. I've highlighted some of the new features like the Zoom, Scrollbar, and the ad on the bottom. I'm not sure what happened on the page in the lower part of the image. Perhaps the scanner had a problem on that particular day with this book. Take a look at any even page -- it goes all the way through the book. The scrolling works fairly well, although some pages will take a bit of time to load when clicking quickly (depending on the speed of your net connection).

For some reason, the screenshot above does not include the two-page view available for some books. See below for an example. I'm not sure why it works for some and not others. Click the two page icon to get the book-like view below, but you then lose the ability to scroll down to see the next pages. Also note the "Full screen" option and new display of information on the right. The Full Screen view gets rid of the right column and top of the screen information. It is a better reading view, although I still think I prefer the flip book interface shown at the Open Library and available from many titles at the Open Access Text Archive.

Overall, Google has made some nice improvements and is providing better descriptive information. The older books still have less. For example, Google only gives title, author, and date for The Village Millionaire with no publisher information. The Contents section is near useless for this title, and for some reason, there is no PDF download option for this 1854 book.