Google Book Search

Google has just announced some new features for their book search:

To start, you can create your own personal collection on Book Search, and use it to help find just the right book from your collection for any occasion.

and

We’ve been working on ways to help you dive in and explore interesting ideas and connections in books. Today we’re pleased to announce Popular Passages, a way to follow the literary memes that appear again and again in the world of books.

With the full text of millions of books digitized, we started thinking about how people quote and build on each other’s ideas. Like Bartlett putting together the Familiar, the Google Book Search team has been uncovering a vox populi of passages that authors have deemed worth repeating. Take, for example, Eleanor Roosevelt’s book, You Learn by Living, in which she describes how her experiences helped shape her personal philosophy. On the “About this Book” page, you’ll see it has 10 Popular Passages. One of them, “You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience,” appears in over a hundred books in the index. Wow.

(via The Millions)