Google Unveils Book Preview Tool

by Craig Morgan Teicher -- Publishers Weekly, 9/22/2008 2:01:00 PM

Yesterday, Google announced a new feature tied to its Book Search program, a widget-like tool called Google Previews. By adding simple code to their Web sites, publishers, retailers or anyone with sufficient technical knowledge can embed a Google-hosted preview of up to 20% of any book that has been included in the Google Book Search database.

Several retailers, including Books-A-Million and Blackwell Bookshop, have already enabled the service, and Borders and Powell’s plan to implement it soon. Google has partnership agreements with these retailers stipulating that the retailers will enable Google Preview for all books in the Book Search Index; in exchange, Google provides a more heavyweight version of the Preview software, with update and support, than is available to general Web site developers, according to Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships.

Widgets that embed book content into Web sites are nothing new—LibreDigital, and Ingram both offer similar services to their clients—but Google’s service is free and accessible to any publisher, or Web site developer, who would like to show a preview of a book in the Google database. Darin Sennett, director of Web development at Powell’s, who plans to get Google Preview active on the site in the next three to six weeks, was excited to be able to implement a tool that he felt “people more and more are going to naturally demand. It’s phenomenal that Google has this level of resource and are willing to give it away, especially to retailers.”