February 29, 2008

Google Book Search Adds a Social Layer

Book Search is the fourth Google service that integrates with the unified Google profiles. The list of favorite books includes a small widget with information from the Google profile.

If you find someone who has interesting books in his library, you can add him to a list of favorite libraries. Unfortunately, Google doesn't show when there are new books in your favorite libraries and doesn't make it easy to discover libraries that might interest you. Based on the books from your library, Google could recommend other similar books and a list of users with similar tastes. To make the library more personal, people should be able to annotate books and highlight interesting excerpts.


{ via Inside Book Search }

5 comments:

  1. This looks great, thanks for bringing it to my attention. Hopefully Google will flesh it out with more features soon.

    thx again,
    edoray

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  2. I've been using Google Book Search a bit. If all you want to do is compile and share your library then it works great. It definitely needs a bit more work however.

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  3. I think the most powerful feature of Google's "My Library" is that you can search inside a collection of books. Think of this as a custom search engine for books. It would be nice to be able to see the full text, at least for the books from your library.

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  4. Hey Ionut! It's not the fourth, Google Notebooks use the profiles too ;D

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  5. @Leon:
    I can't see them. Can you explain where they are used? I suppose Google Notebook could add profiles in the public notebooks.

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