Read Books Online and Share your Library with Others

Hey, did you know about the Google Books site? I did not before I read the related presentation at Beautiful Beta blog. Somehow, that slipped my attention. No, I do not read books on my computer; I prefer old fashion paper copies with real pages. But, the site will be my additional source of reference books for my MBA college study. You have also a long list of magazines. Remember, that reading online will help to extend green solutions to the magazines publishing. How often the magazine goes to the paper trash basket with pages never flipped?

Google Books

But, that is more. In Google Books you can create your own Library; you can easily share with your friends. To giving you an example, I created a small test library with several books on the topic of Google AdSense. Take a look here to see it. Creating your own Google Books Library is simple and fast. First of all, you need to have a Google account. As a Blogger user, you probably have one. After signing in on your Google account, select "more" from the menu bar on the Google main page. This opens a small pop-up menu, where you can select "Books". Or you can go directly to the address: http://books.google.com/.

This brings you to the Books-page, where you start creating your Library by "Importing Books". You can easily add books to your Library by entering a list of ISBN-numbers. Google will look up all book data. After importing several books, return to the main page and click on "My Library" in the menu bar to see your Library Listing. Now you can add comments, reviews, and a ranking (0-5 stars) to your books.

But you might be interested to share your books collection with readers of your own blog. After you set up your Library, you can create the special Widget to display the Google Books Library nicely. The easiest way to create the widget is through Yahoo! Pipes.

It will take just a minute to set it up.

1. Get your Google Books Library URL
Go to your Google Books Library page. Select the contents from your browser’s address bar by right-clicking on it and selecting "copy" from the popup menu.

2. Create the Widget with Yahoo Pipes
Go to my Google Books Library Pipe by clinking on the link. In the entry-field, enter the URL by right-clicking and pasting the URL you just copied. Click the "Run Pipe" button. Your Library data are retrieved, and displayed as a list of titles and descriptions.

If the output is as you expected, go on to the next step.

3. Add the Widget to your Blog
Now click on "Get as a Badge". Badge is the Yahoo-word for Widgets. This will bring up the Badge Configuration Window. In this window, click on "Customize the size, type and settings of your Badge". In the entry-field again paste your Google Books URL and click "Next". Now select "Blogger" as the destination for your Badge. This brings you to the familiar Blogger-screen, where you can select the Blog, and enter the heading for the new Page Element. Click on "Add Widget", and afterwards view your Blog.

Yahoo Pipes + Google Books