Launched in 2003, Google Book Search (hereafter “Book Search”) is another important component in Google's effort to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” 1. The project's aim is to make the content of all books, regardless of format, accessible via Google's search products 2. Like Scholar, however, Book Search is both powerful and problematic - its inner workings are largely unexplained by Google, and its results are potentially deceptive to the untrained eye. In this module we will take a look at how to use Book Search effectively, and other resources that are available to the UMUC community to obtain print and electronic books.
II. The universal library?
As the subtitle of a 2007 New Yorker profile of Book Search - “the quest for the universal library” – indicates, it may be acquiring the same
reputation for comprehensiveness that Search and Scholar enjoy. Like these services, however, Book Search is capable of finding some categories of content but
partly or entirely blind to others.
A query in Book Search will search:
Book records from WorldCat and 15 other union catalogs representing collections in 30+ countries
Full text of some books no longer in copyright that have been scanned by Google
Excerpts from books in copyright that have been scanned by Google or made available by its partner publishers.
Book Search cannot find:
The full text of books in copyright that Google has not scanned or been provided with by its partners.
The full text of public domain titles not yet scanned by the company, or which Google has decided not to make completely available.
Google has not made public the number of books whose content can be accessed via Book Search, the guidelines for how titles from its partner libraries and publishers are selected for inclusion, or how frequently new content is made accessible via the site 3. O'Leary has reported - and our test searches confirm - that information about books published within the most recent two years as well as many older books still in copyright (“most of the 20th century's publishing”) often cannot be found by Book Search at present 4.
III. How does Google make book content available?
Google began establishing partnerships with libraries and publishers in 2003 with the goal of scanning or licensing public domain and copyrighted (either “invisible” or not previously available digitally) content. At present it is scanning tens of thousands of books each week from its 20 partner libraries, which include Harvard, Oxford , Princeton, Stanford, The New York Public Library, The National Library of Catalonia, University Complutense of Madrid , and the universities of California, Michigan, Texas, Virginia, and Wisconsin . Google is also acquiring content from an unspecified number of commercial publishers, but has made not made a complete list of its partners available, or disclosed detailed information about which of their products can be searched via Book Search.
With these caveats in mind, we will now take a look at using Book Search.
IV. Accessing and using Book Search
Book Search can be accessed via the link shown below, or directly at www.google.com/books :
Opening these links will take you to the Book Search basic search page: (*Click on the "Advanced Book Search" link in the image below to start a short film about using Book Search.)
Of the search operators we saw in Modules 2 and 3, the following will work in Book Search (AND remains implied):
OR
- (NOT)
author: (“inauthor” will work in Book Search as well)
phrase searching (e.g., “Chalmers Johnson”)
intitle:
To these, Book Search adds several new operators:
inpublisher:
Replicates the effect of limiting a search using the “Publisher” field in the advanced search form, restricting searches to the publisher(s) entered:
date:
The “date:” operator has the same effect as the “publication date” field on the advanced search form. Either a single year or a range of years can be entered but, as noted previously, date restriction is only marginally effective in Book Search:
isbn:
“isbn:” limits searches only to the International Standard Book Number of titles findable via Book Search:
V. Understanding Book Search results
Here is a Book Search results page - in it we can see three categories of books that your searches
will locate : Full view, limited preview, and snippet view.
Links in Book Search results
The following links appear in Book Search results sets:
(1) About This Book:
Clicking on the “About This Book” link will take you to a page that lets you to view the available text of a book, as well as more information about it. The “About This Book” pages for some titles – generally those for which full text is available – are quite information-rich: maps and links to other Book Search and Scholar items are generated by automatic keyword searching, and sample page images and links for finding still more information about the book are made available. Some of the more useful features of these pages include:
More about the "Find in a Library" feature
Libraries owning the book are listed in ascending order of distance from the user (results are generally automatically generated based on the location of the user's internet service provider, but location can be manually entered as well). Clicking on the name of any library in the list will take the user into its online catalog. For libraries such as those in the University System of Maryland where UMUC users have borrowing privileges, books can be directly requested for delivery directly from the catalogUSMAI page linked to via WorldCat. Book Search results contain numerous links to sites from which titles can be bought, but free access to book content is always available to UMUC users through catalogUSMAI or Document Express.
Links in Book Search results continued
(2) Table of Contents
Clicking on the “Table of Contents” link for a book will open the viewer and take the user directly to the book's table of contents page.
Space only allows us to provide a basic overview of Book Search results and the features available in them, but please do not hesitate to post a question in the Conference for this module or to contact us directly if you have any questions.
VI. Copyright settlement and the future of Book Search
Google recently settled a long-running and contentious copyright infrigement lawsuit against it by the Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers related to its scanning of materials for use by Book Search.
While the settlement appears to put to rest questions regarding the service's long-term viability, the agreement has yet to be approved, and appears headed for a long process of revision as the parties involved seek clarification and revision through the courts.
The American Library Association has created a blog that tracks changes in the settlement agreement that impact librarians and scholars.
VII. Alternatives for finding book content on the Web
In addition to the print books available to you and your students via catalogUSMAI, a number of options are available for obtaining full text, electronic books online:
NetLibrary database:
UMUC's subscription to NetLibrary provides you with access to thousands of electronic books. Fielded searching of descriptive data as well as keyword
searching of full text is possible, and many of these books can be downloaded to your desktop. Like Book Search, NetLibrary's coverage is weaker for recent
years, but it does provide access for many 2000-2006 titles. For more information, please see:
www.umuc.edu/library/database/netlibrary.shtml
Project Gutenberg and freely accessible e-books:
Many organizations are working to make the full text of books freely available via the Web. Founded in 1992 and now offering over 20,000 titles
Project Gutenberg is the largest of these, and provides full text access to many titles not available
through Book Search (and vice versa of course, it is always worth checking both when searching for a title). The library's E-Books on the Web page provides
links to Project Gutenberg and other providers of free e-books: www.umuc.edu/library/database/ebooks_web.shtml
The newly introduced Digital Books Index gives links to sites providing access to over 90,000 free e-books, and allows for searching of the content of multiple
sites simultaneously: www.digitalbookindex.org
In the next module we will shift our focus from print to photographs, paintings, drawings and the many other images searchable with Google Images.
Launched in 2003, Google Book Search (hereafter “Book Search”) is another important component in Google's effort to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” 1. The project's aim is to make the content of all books, regardless of format, accessible via Google's search products 2. Like Scholar, however, Book Search is both powerful and problematic - its inner workings are largely unexplained by Google, and its results are potentially deceptive to the untrained eye. In this module we will take a look at how to use Book Search effectively, and other resources that are available to the UMUC community to obtain print and electronic books. 
