Google Allows Cutting and Pasting From Its Library of Books

As Francis Bacon once said:

He didn’t mention that some books are made to be sliced up and thrown around in the literary equivalent of food fights.

This month Google unveiled new features for its fast-growing collection of searchable books, and one of them is the ability to cut and paste text from its books. Such sampling had not been easy in the past because Google’s books are displayed as image files rather than as text. Now users can use a new selection tool to identify a favorite clip, and a pop-up window appears offering the text, or Web code that allows a picture of the sample to be pasted into a document or blog.

There’s a huge catch: This feature is only available on Google books that are in the public domain. A Google spokeswoman this week would not say how many books, or what proportion of the collection, that is, but in a long searching session this week I had trouble finding books in the system with this feature. One book that did emerge is a 1919 edition of Familiar Quotations by John Bartlett, a book made for a cut-and-paste world.

Another new feature gives readers their own personal bookshelf in Google’s virtual library. Every book in the system now has an “add to my library” link that saves the book’s bibliographic information in a personal account (this requires a free Google account). In the spirit of Web 2.0, you can also invite others to check out your personal library, even turning it into an RSS feed that will automatically announce recent finds to colleagues. Again, though, because so few of Google’s books display the full text of works, the personal library is really more of a personal card catalog. —Jeffrey R. Young