Google Books Improves

Google Books has released a number of improvements designed to make reading and sharing their material easier. The Books blog, Inside Google Book Search lists seven changes:

1. embedding and links – From the new toolbar on a Books page you can copy a link to the source or the html necessary to produce an iframe in your blog or web page that will embed the source.
2. improved search – There’s now more context around your search terms, and you can rank your search results by relevance as well as page order.
3. thumbnail view – More useful, perhaps, where images are involved, you can see an overview in thumbnails of the book you’re examining.
4. drop-down menu – The drop-down menu displays links to the various divisions within the book.
5. plain text mode – Viewers can turn off the html mode and work simply with plain text.
6. page turn animation – This feature, invoked by clicking at the bottom of the screen, simulates a more natural progression through the book.
7. improved book overview – There’s more data about the book offered on the overview page.

Take it for a spin. Here’s a link to Gender Justice, Citizenship and Development, edited by Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, Navsharan Singh; International Development Research Centre (Canada)