As part of Google’s push into the digital book market (see Friday’s post), the company launched last week My Library, which lets you create lists of your own books, search the content of your book inventory by keyword, and then share your book lists with friends. (You can see examples of these book lists here and here, and also get Google’s official spiel on the project here.) It’s a nice idea for students and scholars, but will it have much take-up with the broader reading public? I’m skeptical, but you tell me? We’ve got many bona fide readers here. Will you be sinking time into building your Google Library? Or are you instead ever-refining your Facebook profile and sharing booklists there? Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Check out the Visual Bookshelf app on Facebook, which offers an effective way of sharing your books with your social network. Also be sure to scan Deeplinking’s compilation, The Big List of Bookish Social Networks. Finally, if you create a booklist on Google Library (start making one here), send the urls our way and we’ll post them.
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This sounds like Google BookSearch meets the fabulous LibraryThing.com
I tried out “My Library”, yes, very useful BUT has anyone at Google ever heard of the Dewey system used in libraries? Or indeed any method of organising books under subjects? Even searches by author can be frustrating; one search found nothing by an author, yet one by title found the book, complete with the “non-existent” author’s name (and yes, it was spelt correctly). Report card: good, but could improve.
Thanks for mentioning LibraryThing. It was one of the items flagged in Deeplinking’s compilation.
Thanks for the link. I’ve been all over Google’s My Library since it launched. The full-text search is what won me over — something LibraryThing, Shelfari and the other bookish social networks are not going to be able to match. But widgets for the web and Facebook would be nice, for sure.
Disappointing. May be google will improve it in their next release. For now, I love the Books iRead app on Facebook. Let’s me create book club and invite my friends.
[…] why not add them to our “My Library” page on Google, a new product that we briefly mentioned yesterday. You can access the collection here (or get it by rss feed). And, as you’ll see, we also […]