Friday, September 07, 2007

Google Book Search 'My Library' so far falls short

So, I saw the items I Shared about Google Book Search now allowing a 'My Library' feature, with the potential promise of letting me put up a collection of books and allowing me to search them. If true, that would be huge - put all my church books up and let google pull out the bits I need for a talk, or build a whole ideal research library and go wild looking up text within. Sadly, that's not the case. I figured a way for Librarything to give me all my ISBNs, which I then imported into Google reader - about 1/3 were rejected for unknown reasons.

The rest are here, in 'My Library'. Kinda cool, but nothing Librarything doesn't already do. One thing you'll notice is that nearly all of the books have 'No Preview Available', which means their text isn't searchable on Google Book Search. A few have 'Limited Preview', which is just as useless.

So, for now at least, the 'My Library' function isn't all that useful.

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