From Lifehacker.com I stumbled across this post on the Google Operating System Blog about a method of embedding Google Books into blogs and web pages…
Google made it easy to embed in a site any book available at Google Book Search. You can add a fully-functional widget using this code:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>
GBS_insertEmbeddedViewer(‘GkCpLIk7aisC‘,600,500);
</script>where you should replace GkCpLIk7aisC with the corresponding book ID, which can be obtained from the URL.
I can see this as a great way to site sources in blog posts, or to highlight reviews, etc. For example, there have been several posts about John Boyanoski’s books on ghosts in upper South Carolina. While I couldn’t find John’s books in Google Books, I was able to find Tally Johnson’s “Ghosts of the South Carolina Upcountry”, which is very similar to Boyanoski’s book.
The comments on the blog posts go into greater depth about how to link to specific pages and problems that might be encountered using this script on various sites. Most of those methods involve additional code that don’t work very well as embeds.
The other drawback is that you can really only embed one book per blog post. Correction – you can do more than one, but it puts them altogether in your post. You can’t have a book, then a bit of text, then another book. Something about the script joins the embeds.
Regardless, this looks pretty cool, and I may start adding more of them here.