Although we aren’t going to take sides on the Google Books settlement debate in this article, we will say that the reasons for writers to love Google outside of that controversial issue just keep piling up. Today, Google made all of its Google Books content searchable from regular results pages.

Let’s face it, after all: the average person probably doesn’t know that Google Book Search exists. Google doesn’t make it visible along with the main “Images,” “Videos,” and “Maps” tabs, tucking it away under “more” instead.

So it’s important that now, after someone searches for a term or phrase from Google.com, they can click on the little “+ Show options” button and see the word “Books” displayed as the second-from-the-top choice.

A post on the Inside Google Books blog explained to users, “This will provide easier access to books and magazines by letting you slice and dice your results with certain characteristics. For example, you can now search for only books or magazines or for only content that you can preview in Google Books.”

This is almost sure to lead to greater exposure for some writers, and that’s a very good thing.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 18th, 2009 at 4:51 pm and is filed under digital. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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