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Google has decided to expand the boundaries of online book reading to a larger number of sites and by including more books in its Book Search. This would enable users to have more books to read online and this becomes possible as Google brings out a set of tools that can be used to embed books into websites of publishers, retailers, etc.

The tools will also provide new and better ways for such sites to display a complete text search result using Book Search. Apart from that it will enable users to have various social features like rating and review.

What this is going to do is make it possible for users shopping for books online to have a preview of the book, pretty much like one can browse across pages of a book before they  actually buy or borrow it. This feature is enabled on the partner sites that use the new feature, where as users can view up to 20% of the books and zoom in and out of a page for a closer read at Book Search.

The feature is available on various partner sites, that include retailers namely, Books-A-Million, A1Books, The Book Depository etc to those including library catalogs like WorldCat.org etc. The idea is to make Book Search reach a wider audience and provide an enhanced user experience. The feature is available as an  open API here.

We think that the feature is pretty useful as it enables users to get an idea by skimming through a pages as to what the book is about. Its fast, easy and helpful and time will tell how many of the retailers and publishers adopt the idea.