Ok, well apparently we’re a month and four days short on the notice, but Google Books has opened up their API enough that developers can pull link information from the Google Books db on any item. Here’s a shortlist of what we can do now*…
- Link to Books in Google Book Search using ISBNs, LCCNs, and OCLC numbers
- Know whether Google Book Search has a specific title and what the viewability of that title is
- Generate links to a thumbnail of the cover of a book
- Generate links to an informational page about a book
- Generate links to a preview of a book
*http://code.google.com/apis/books/
Some interesting examples of what people have formally done with it are at the Deschutes Public Library, and Vancouver company AndorNot (information management and consulting) have a great working example as well as useful feedback from testing with it. According to them, it’s still buggy in FF and IE (not sure if that’s both win and mac), which is a little disappointing. But overall, this is very good news!
More on the Google Book Search Book Viewability API at Google’s Code(Developers) and Blog.