It is great to see that Google listens to the little people.

A while back I emailed Google and told them that they need to make an API system for Google Books, and that they should allow users to create their own little ‘bookshelf’ of Google books that they can then search. They emailed back and said it was a great idea that a few others have also suggested.

The API system isn’t here (yet), but you can now create your own library of google books as long as you have an account. This is very cool! Once you do a search, you will have an option to “add it to your library”. Once you do that, the list of books are available on a dedicated page accessible along the top of the page. From there, you can choose to search just those specific books. How unbelievably great is that!

This is going to be a very valuable resource. I’ll tell you how I am specifically going to use it right now. As many of you know I’ve started my PhD. So I’m going to populate this google books library with titles related to my dissertation topic. That way, I can do ‘in-text’ searches of the books. Now if all those nitpicky publishers would just get on the google books bandwagon, we would be talking real full text search. Unfortunately, the amount of material shown in the books is subject to the publisher.

Wait, it gets even better! If you are smart you use bibliographic management software or at least have a big excel or word file with all your books. Take all the ISBN’s of your books, and import the books straight into your google books library!

Happy researching!

books.google.com