Embedding Books on a Website

Now, in addition to flying across the country with Google Maps in satellite view, or finding pictures with Google Images, or searching for scholarly articles with Google Scholar, you can embed a digitized book on your website.

Today, Google Book Search, the popular and somewhat controversial service that has digitized millions of books, announced an open set of APIs (application programming interfaces) that will allow anyone to embed book previews on their web site. Several bookstores (including Borders and Powell's) and university libraries (Universities of California and Texas) have already signed up. Although the Google Book Search API is useful, it will take more to advance digital scholarship. For that, Google needs to provide the ability to mine the texts for patterns and to combine them with other digital corpora. This is just the beginning. I'm waiting to see what comes next.