Book info where you need it, when you need it

Posted by Frances Haugen, Associate Product Manager and Matthew Gray, Software Engineer, Book Search

Here at Google Book Search we love books. To share this love of books (and the tremendous amount of information we've accumulated about them), today we've released a new API that lets you link easily to any of our books. Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.

As an example of the API in use, check out the Deschutes Public Library in Oregon, which has added a link to "Preview this book at Google" next to the listings in their library catalog. This enables Deschutes readers to preview a book immediately via Google Book Search so that they can then make a better decision about whether they'd like to buy the book, borrow it from a library or whether this book wasn't really the book they were looking for.

We think this API will be useful to all sites that connect readers with information about books, from library catalogs to public libraries to universities. To see more implementations in action, read this post on the Book Search blog.