Google listened to my feature request and added a way to tell Book Search what books I actually own. This will be an extremely useful feature for me!

Feature announcement: http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-own-library-on-book-search.html

My feature request for personal media search:
http://blogoscoped.com/forum/89006.html#id89152
  

Nice!

This is fantastic! I hope they expand it to cover music as well as books, I hope they extend the XML output to include some of the data they include in the book detail page, and I hope they create a GData feed so I can add my books via an API like Picasaweb.

http://blog.radioactiveyak.com/2007/09/my-google-library.html

Nice? Useful? Fantastic?
I don't think so.

TOMHTML: Why the hate?

Just about everyone I know with a collection of more than 100 books has some way of cataloging their books (Excel spreadsheets, custom software, etc).

This is a really neat online catalog that gives you a bunch of extra book details for all your books, the ability to search your collection (including 'search inside' for some of them), and the ability to share your collection with others. What's not nice, useful, or fantastic about that?

I like the feature very much! Great idea and now, I can have a online book shelf that goes with my everywhere!

This feature is nice, useful and fantastic for a small percentage of Google Books' users. And there is no many users of Google Books by the way.

The majority of users use Google Books:
1) by accident
2) for searching for something, one specific thing
3) for discovering new books
Only people in the third case will use this thing

TOMHTML: I agree with your initial point, but disagree with your conclusion!

I've never use used Google Book Search on purpose, or if I have it's been for point 1 or 2 as you've listed. This new feature adds two entirely new categories:

4) for keeping an (online) catalog of their books.
5) for sharing their book collections with friends.

I'm firmly in camps 4 and 5, so by adding this new feature they've made me a frequent user of Google Books when up until now I've barely even looked at it.

I think it's a wise move precisely because it gives people a *new* reason for using the site when not many people were doing so before.

Reto Meier : I agree I may start using it more now
The only time before was when I was writing a Romeo and Juliet essay for my GCSE coursework and I didn't have a copy of the book.

The first book I added to my library? "55 Ways to Have Fun With Google" :D

Anyone knows a hack how to export all ISBNs from the Amazon order history? This could then be used to import back into Google My Library...

LibraryThing has been around several years and is far superior to Google's offering and also slightly better than Shelfari (Amazon's offering).

Ans=d you are CEO and Co-Founder? Just Kidding...

I've a huge e-book library on my computer.
Right now I use Google Desktop to index them.
Someone knows a tool which extracts ISBN numbers from pdf and/or chm files?

Reto : I may agree for #4, but not for #5 because I'm not sure it will be useful for your friends.
And one problem is that not all your books are available on Google Books. I've just tried with my own books on my shelf and the only match is John Battelle's "The Search".
Of course, perhaps I don't love this new feature because I don't read books. But I suppose that I'm not alone in this case.

TOMHTML: Well if you don't read books you're pretty much out of the target demographic by definition! :)

The biggest failing at the moment is the fact that a lot of books aren't in their database yet. Hopefully this will improve.

It probably will with there new ebook feature, you can probably buy the books and they'll be added into this place

I'll probably check this out, but I agree that LibraryThing will be hard to beat.

I've just tried to import my ~500 book collection:

http://books.google.com/books?as_list=BDRX3sb8Qle7H_avPj7zIARoUGTsYyTieBcX5BvjDGhGptiCJN4M

It managed to import about 200 of them, very few with covers or additional information. I think this is mainly because most of my books are published outside of America (UK and Australia).

Logically, functionality like "My Library" should be integrated into Google Base.

Ok, the FBI must be jubilating. You're doing their work for free, and far better thant they did after monitoring librairies after 9/11.
I'll myself check if what you read fits into my definition of normality. I'll send robot killers to your door if not.

More seriously, that's scary.
At least, there should be at least an option to make it private. It's a very powerful tool, but you should be able to control it completely, with refined sharing options (friends and family only)

PierreS: There is a way. Don't put your books in it :)

Seriously though, things like this aren't scary. Monitoring libraries is scary because it effects people's access to information (and records who accesses what). Your Google Book 'library'? Not using it doesn't stop you reading books...

(Note: I'd still like to have privacy settings on this and Picasaweb, I just don't think it's a scary government surveillance issue...)

http://blogoscoped.com/forum/104125.html#id104125 :-)
Haven't tried this yet, but can you limit queries to the books in your library?

Andreas: Yep!

I've tested LibraryThing and I like it, but I've been using Bookpedia a bit more. I've been using the CueCat scanner to load my books and if I remember correctly Bookpedia has an export function, so I think I should be able to upload a batch of isbn(s).

Excellent Posting Philipp

Please, please make this available for Google scholar – and I will love you for ever!

It's anti-scary, in fact.
Consider: if there was an option to make that info private (or shared with control),
1. many more people would enter their books info
2. government would still be able to easily get to that data, via the activity they are the best at (abusing the laws)
3. Google would probably be legally obligated to be quiet about government intrusions, inflating the false sense of security users will have
4. targeting would be easier: instead of combing through all, just go through the users that keep most of their books info private.

This is much better. In this way, people realize the info they enter isn't private. And as Reto says, non-entering data doesn't stop them from reading their books.

Just wanted to raise the point. ;-)

>The "ci" parameter contains the coordinates for left, top, right and bottom.

Should be distance to the left edge, distance to the top edge, width, hight