+ Bradley on Changes at Google Book Search: Google Book Search Improved(?)
Like Phil Bradley is famous for, this post offers crisp and incisive analysis and opinion. What follows some might consider a sidebar.

We would suggest knowing about and using more than one online book services. A searcher has plenty to choose from. This is no different than using more than one web search engine.

Here are just a few other favorites ResourceShelf favorites we’ve compiled.

+ Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” (new books) and MSN’s Book Search (both old and new) are two candidates. We’ve found it’s often the case that a preview (the ability to “search inside” is available on one service but not the other. Battelle’s, The Search is one example. A || G. We also like the interesting stats Amazon often provides.

Live Book Search also will show how much (all, 10%, 20%, 40%, words around search terms) can be viewed online. Like other services, books that offer 100% of their content online (primarily titles where the copyright has expired) can often be downloaded as PDF files at no charge.

The Online Books Page is the place to begin for freely accessible full text books online. Don’t forget to review the new listings page with hundreds of books listed weekly (including Gutenberg and Google Library Program titles, RSS feed, too!)

ebrary Discover offers over 20,000 NEW full text books for free (pay only to print or copy, about $.25 cents/U.S.).

The World Public Library offers more than 500,000 full text titles.

The International Children’s Digital Library is amazing for both kids and older children.

Full text books and cool technology from the Turning the Pages service at The British Library.

A number of full text collections from The Internet Archive.

NetLibrary is a service that many libraries offer at no charge, for free, without having to visit the library. Full text, full image without a limit on how much you can read, annotate, etc. The same goes for Safari Tech Books and Books24×7. The latter two services also offer individual subscriptions.

Finally, the Digital Book Index lists over 137,000 online books with nearly 100,000 available free.

See Also: About a year ago, we compared a bunch of classic titles using both Amazon and Google focusing on titles that could be previewed online.

UPDATE: Here’s an example of a book where the full text is available from Live Book Search but not available via the Google Book Search database. Of course, plenty of examples can also illustrate the opposite of this scenario.

UPDATE: LISNEWS.com on the Release of a New German Book Service

+ Elsevier launches DoctorPortal, the independent online voice of UK doctors (via Elsevier)
Direct to DoctorPortal.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 and is filed under E-books, New Websites and Resources, Source File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.