Google has announced new features for their book search service, including search for popular quotes.

You may now use the search engine to create your own library. My Library can be used to organize, comment, and search the full text of the books you select.

You may also add labels, write reviews and rate books, before publishing this content via a special public link or an RSS feed.

Furthermore, you may now copy and post text from out-of-copyright books and paste it into a word processor or blog to share with others.

Then there are new refinement links on the results pages, that point to categories of books that might be of relevance to your query.

Google has also added a “Explore Popular passages” feature, which should become popular among students of litterature. Google says:

“Our new ‘Popular Passages’ feature displays quotations or other excerpts of a book that appear in lots of other books.”

We like it, but it is a bit hard to find. The trick is to click on a book and look in the right hand column of the book presentation page. There should be a book called popular passages. Here is one for Ibsen’s Peer Gynt.

My Library and the other new features is another proof of Google understanding the relevance of book search. At the moment it might seem as a quaint attempt to attract librarians and irritate French politicians only. It is not. This is another step towards providing a broad based, comprehensive library of all text content available, being that Web based or printed material.

Thanks to Marketing Pilgrim for discovering this one.
See also Inside Google Book Search Blog: My (own) library on Book Search
My Library FAQ
Google Press Release