Download Squad

Sure, Google is planning to start selling access to digital books online. But that's not all Google Book Search is good for. Today Google announced a few new features for its online book service.

My Library

You can create a "book collection," using Google Book Search. When you search for titles, a new option pops up to add books to "my library."

You won't be able to read your books online, but since you're theoretically only supposed to add books to your library if you already own them, you should be able to walk over to your shelf. But now you can also do a full text search of your book collection if you're looking for a quote or a passage.

Libraries are publicly visible, so if you've got a few books you'd rather your spouse or parents not know about, you might want to keep them to yourself.

Embed segments of public domain books

Google had also added the ability to embed text from public domain works on any website. When you're reading a book, just click the box at the top of the window and use your cursor to select text on the page. You'll have the option of saving the book snippet to your Google Notebook, Blogger blog, or getting HTML to embed the text in a web page. You can either save the text as a book image or as plain text.

We've copied a bit of text from Charles Darwin's Origin of Species after the jump.