How to use Google Books

The Google Books Project was presented in autumn 2004 to promote and disseminate books via the internet through the mass digitisation of books. It includes books from libraries such as the Library of Catalonia and the Hispanic Digital Library (which have entered the public domain and which, in these cases, are 100% visible) with others published in any language and on any subject by publishers worldwide, including the most recent new titles, which are only partially visible as they are subject to copyright.

From the information search point of view, Google Books is an excellent information source for finding books on the internet. The Google Books search engine lets you run searches by author, title, publisher or words in the digitised text of the book. You will not always find 100% accessible texts, as sometimes you can only see the cover, the title page or the table of contents, but on many occasions you can consult excerpts, complete chapters or even the whole book. In fact, when you run a search and the results are displayed, you have the option of filtering them by the following options:

1) All books

2) Limited preview and full view

3) Only complete view

4) Only public domain

Besides being a very interesting information source for finding books on the internet, Google Books can be a highly useful information source if you are searching for a book that is no longer on sale, if you are interested in consulting bibliographic curiosities from past centuries, if you need to create a bibliography for a piece of work, if you want to follow an author, if you want to give an original citation, if you're looking for a part of a book where there is a specific sentence, etc. If the book that you are searching for in Google Books is not digitised, it can also be useful for finding the original, knowing what libraries you can find it in or even buying it if it is on sale.

Fig. 1

Once you find a book, by accessing its specifications on the left of the screen (Fig. 1), you'll find a list of links to bookshops to buy the book, and at the end is the option to search for the document in a library ("search in a library"). Google links you to the register of that work in the REBIUN catalogue, which is the group catalogue of Spanish University Libraries. In some cases, if the title does not appear in the REBIUN catalogue, it links you to other catalogues, such as WORLDCAT, the leading university libraries catalogue in the United States.

Yet of all the information that Google Books offers in relation to a specific work, perhaps the most interesting, due to its originality, is what you find from the "About this book" link, where you'll find information of interest that will allow you to monitor the book comprehensively:

  • All the details about the book and the library from which the copy was obtained

  • Other editions of this book

  • Book reviews

  • The "Most Popular Passages", i.e. the most commonly cited texts or excerpts from the book in other works

  • Related books, e.g. works by the same author

  • Other books in which this book is cited

  • Websites on which the book is cited

  • References of academic works that cite the book, with a link to each of these works through Google Scholar.

  • And even, in some cases, such as travel books labelled as "travel", the Google Maps image with the geographical places cited in the book

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