Embed Google Books Just Like YouTube Videos
Google has made its Book Search service embeddable — you can now use a small code snippet to add any book in Google Book Search to your pages. The tools work just like similar sharing options on YouTube — cut-and-paste a JavaScript snippet and you’re done.
The result is a smaller embedded version of the listings on the Book Search site, complete with zoom tools and searching capabilities. Of course, as with Google Book Search, for newer titles you’ll only be able to browse up to 20 percent of the book.
While embedding an online text in your site may not be as exciting, or conducive to today’s bite-size web, as a video, the real appeal here is that online bookstores, libraries and book sharing sites now potentially have a way to show users a preview of the text.
The Book Search blog reports that WorldCat.org, weRead and a number of other book-related sites — including our favorite, Goodreads, whose implementation is pictured above — are already using the new embedding tools.
[via Google Operating System]
