A few month’s ago while looking up some information on a particular book, one of the results returned by Google directed me towards their new GOOGLE’S BOOK SEARCH BETA. Ever since I discovered this little gem of Google’s, I have been using it nonstop. If you have a Google user name, you are even able to add titles to your own library. Currently, I’ve got a fair number of titles in my library, and anyone interested can check my books out HERE. You’ll probably notice a bit of a trend regarding my current interests!
Once you’ve searched for a title, a number of title links will be presented to you – or you can do a more general topic search with these results returned instead. Depending on the book itself, you’ll be able to access its information by one of three means. You can either get the full preview of the book, a limited preview or a snippet view. The final one returns a page with all of the specifics of the particular book while the other two offer so much more. Even with a limited preview, normally you are able to read substantial portions of the book, generally a few chapters at the very least. If you really want to read the entire book and this is not an available option, there are ways around this though a tad bit time consuming and annoying.
Pretty much clearing your browser’s history and cache will allow you to choose otherwise unavailable chapters – restarting your browser after deleting the above mentioned files certainly doesn’t hurt either. Also, if you have multiple browsers installed on your computer then you can usually open them up and read different chapters amongst your various browsers – by different, I mean Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer. If you’ve got one of the many IE based browsers installed, your history/cache for all of thses will ultimately be treated as one and the same.
One of the recent books that I just finished is entitled Mothers and Illicit Drugs. This book speaks to me on so many levels so I found it particulary helpful. If you go HERE, you can ready some of the book’s more important pages. I’ve created a web page with a number of thumbnails to direct you to these important passages. The page itself is especially easy to navigate.
