Yesterday Google rocked the eBook world by announcing its entry into the market. Their approach is to host everything in the cloud, and all access would be remote. The upside would be that your books are available on any device. The downside would be that you would have to be constantly connected to read them. There’s supposed to be a download option, but I haven’t read up enough on it. In fact, I’m not going to talk about the new service at all (apart from that brief introductory statement.) I’ll let the rest of the blogosphere do that, and perhaps follow up later. Instead, today I’d like to focus on what Google’s been doing all along with it’s Google Books service.
For whatever reason, I really hadn’t paid much attention to everything that was available in Google Books. It was something I knew about and had used on rare occasion. Lately I’ve been exploring it in depth, and I’m really impressed by all the tools available for research and reading. I’ve hinted at this in the last couple of posts, but this time I’ll take one book and put it through its paces.