For now, this new feature is only available in the United States, though according to a blog post on the Google Book Search blog, the company plans to make this feature "available elsewhere in the future."

Maybe the two most noticeable new features are the improved search within books and the new way to turn pages. Before, searching within a book was already one of the most useful features of Google Books, but search results were only displayed in a small sidebar. Now, after this update, search results appear in their context in a list of short snippets from the text. In addition, instead of just seeing results sorted by page number, Google Books can now also sort results by relevance.

Page Turners

As for scrolling through books, a transparent bar at the bottom of the page now allows you to turn pages by just clicking the page turn button. We are not quite sure how useful this is going to be for users on a desktop machine, but this might turn out to be quite a boon for users on laptops and netbooks who don't use an external mouse with a scroll wheel.

Embedding, Table of Contents, Nicer Book Overview Page

Embedding books is also a nice new feature (developers were able to do this with the help of Google's APIs already), as well as the ability to access a drop-down menu with a book's table of contents. For out-of-copyright books, the Google Books team also made the plain text mode easier to find and read.

The new layout for the Book Overview page is also quite nice. In addition to all of this, Google has now moved the sidebar with additional information about a book to the left of the page (it used to be on the right), probably in order to bring the Google Books design in line with the rest of Google's search products.

Overall, this is a nice update for Google Books. There are no spectacular new features here, but better search within books is going to make a big difference for Google Books' usability, and the rest of the new features are good, evolutionary updates of Google Books.

It's a very handy new version of the site that lets you search through and read in full, 1.5 million books on your phone's browser. Regular Google Book Search users know that these books are all scanned in as images, but for the new mobile version Google has used Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to grab the text on the pages. The whole system works quite well.

After spending a few minutes perusing the political science section I found a number of interesting titles that I've bookmarked. The business and economics section is a charming selection of very old books. You have to remember that only works old enough to be in the public domain can be viewed in full for free, but if you can accept that then there's lots of fun to be had. You can also read very old magazines. On your phone!

Check out the Google Book Search blog for more details.

For now, these printers are only available in a about a dozen locations, including the University of Michigan Shapiro Library in Ann Arbor, MI, and the Bibliotheca Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt. The Harvard Book Store will also soon get one of these machines as well. By early 2010, On Demand Books hopes to have sold about 35 to 40 machines and this new deal with Google will surely help the company to reach this goal.

It's good to see that Google acknowledges that not everybody wants to read everything on a screen. While you could always just print out the PDF versions of the public domain books on your own printer, the Espresso machine can quickly print library-quality books in minutes - a service that might just be worth a few dollars.

With the Kindle, Amazon has created the current de facto standard for hardware eReaders, but the market is still young enough for others to be able to regain the lead again. The fact that Sony bothered to send out press releases about the fact that it now offers 1 million free books clearly shows that the competition in the eBook market is heating up.

Sadly, most eReaders are locked down with digital rights management software, so that users can't just transfer books from one device to another. Because of this, users are locked into one store once they buy an eReader, and the availability of books in the eReader's eBook store could easily sway customers in one direction or another. While Sony offers more free books than other companies, the average price in the Sony eBook store is generally higher than the standard $9.99 that Barnes & Noble and Amazon are charging.

It is worth noting that Google only scans these free books and doesn't edit them in any form, so that they often contain spelling errors.

If you own a Sony Reader and want to access these free eBooks, you can download the necessary software here. The PRS-500, one of Sony's first eReaders, however, is not compatible with the Google Books software.

EPUB: The One eBook Standard to Rule them All

EPUB is a free, standardized format that almost every hardware eReader or desktop software understands. Amazon's Kindle, however, cannot read EPUB texts without using some intermediary software that converts these books into a format the Kindle can understand. While there are a few competing formats, EPUB has turned into the de facto standard for eBooks. Some vendors, like Sony, wrap a digital rights management (DRM) solution around these books, but others just publish completely open, non-DRMed versions of their books. The EPUB files from Google Books will not be locked down by a DRM solution.

It is important to note, however, that these EPUB files were run through an optical character recognition (OCR) system and weren't edited afterwards. While this software has greatly improved over the last few years, there are still quite a few mistakes in most books. This post on the Google Books blog explains the conversion process in more detail. The PDF versions of these books don't suffer from this problem, as they are just copies of the actual pages. This also means, however, that these PDF files are far larger and that users can't, for example, adjust the size of the books' fonts according to the size of their screens.

Restored Book (Image Courtesy of VentureBeat)

The books created with the service can also be customized for yourself or as a gift for someone else.

The pilot program for BookPrep is Foodsville, a community-based site for food and cooking enthusiasts. Here, members can read and purchase cookbooks, even rare, older cookbooks, at the site's online bookstore. The books can be found at the site's free library, where members can search for books by keyword, by author, or browse by tags.

Foodsville Library

According to Prakash Reddy, system architect of BookPrep at HP, further down the road, BookPrep could help consumers find hard-to-locate items such as newspapers, blog posts, magazines, books, event schedules and special-interest articles.

BookPrep offers a nice complement to the current lot of print-on-demand services (our coverage), as it provides a way for consumers to access rare, out-of-print books as well as modern ones.

The implications of this announcement for Lulu could be large. Until now, Lulu has been, to my knowledge, the only print on demand publisher that offered books, CDs, and DVDs with no set up fee and offered syndication to sites like Amazon.

CreateSpace beats Lulu on price as well, and doesn't charge for ISBN numbers for books (required for books to be sold on Amazon and listed in the Books in Print catalog) and UPC numbers for CDs and DVDs. Lulu, however, still offers far more printing options (such as hardcover and saddle stitch bindings), and offers the potential of selling products through Amazon competitors like Barnes and Noble -- something that I tend to doubt Amazon will help authors with.

Lulu was one of the companies I had marked in my mind as being ripe for acquisition by either Amazon or eBay. Amazon, it seems, has decided to build instead of buy by relaunching their CustomFlix site as a full-service on demand media publisher.

Via WebProNews.

Book Rights Registry

According to Google, the Book Rights Registry will also help to address the 'orphan' works problem. For a lot of out-of-print books, it is virtually impossible to establish the current copyright holder. However, given that the Books Registry will also be responsible for distributing the income from licensing and advertising, Google hopes that this will be an incentive for rightsholders to claim their abandoned works.

Licenses for Libraries

Libraries, universities, and other organizations will also be able to purchase an institutional subscription, which will give users the ability to access the full text of all the titles in the Google Books index. This, depending on the pricing, could turn out to be a revolutionary development for libraries.

Google Books is already changing the way many of us are doing our research, and having access to even more books is only going to move this trend forward even faster.

It is important to note that this settlement only applies to U.S. copyright holders. Users outside of the U.S. will not see any changes to Google Books yet.

The contest is the kind of traditional marketing that more web applications could benefit from and will no doubt introduce many new people to the features of the service. Our question, though, is this: why not do this every day of the year? At under $300 retail price (and you know Google could get a deal) it would cost around $100k to give one away every day. How much do you think the Google Books team has spent on legal defense in the last year? Millions of dollars, we're sure.

Our guess is, in as much as people know anything about Google Books, it's that the service is in a protracted legal battle with the publishers of the books it's indexing.

We'd guess almost no one knows about the service's new magazine search or the excellent mobile version of the site.

Last month we reported that Google plans to go into the eBook sales business by allowing vendors to sell eBook copies through Google Books.

Why not give away a free reader every day and bring all the people to the site that a promotion like that surely would? Heck, give away three every day. At this point the project has to be bleeding money and yet how often do you hear people talk about it? If eBooks are really a big part of the future, a few hundred thousand dollars spent by Google to promote their offering in this market sure would be money well spent.

Solving CAPTCHAs to Transcribe Books

We took detailed looks at reCAPTCHA and how it works last September and in early 2007. In short, reCAPTCHA has found a nifty way to crowdsource book transcriptions. When users solve a CAPTCHA through reCAPTCHA, the software will give users two words: one with a known answer (the control word) and one where the OCR software wasn't quite sure what the word was. Once a certain number of users have solved the suspicious word with the same result, it becomes a control word itself and the OCR software can learn this word.

Now, Google will be able to use this same technology to improve its own OCR efforts. Google currently makes over 1 million out-of-copyright books available for download through Google Books and one of the main arguments against these books has been the fact that these texts are not edited and include a lot of OCR errors. With reCAPTCHA, Google could potentially bring the error rate down dramatically and make Google Books even more useful.

According to Merkel, the German government wants to protect its authors. Google, according to Merkel, is "just scanning books without any regard to copyright law," and "the Internet should not be exempt from copyright laws," she also adds.

In this context, it is important to note that Germany has always been extremely protective of books as a cultural product. Book retailers, for example, have to sell all new books at a set price and can only discount older or damaged books under a limited set of circumstances. It's currently not clear if these price-fixing rules also apply to eBooks.

"eBooks Won't Replace Traditional Books"

Merkel also stressed that she doesn't believe that eBooks will ever replace traditional books  - though she does mention that 'new' technologies like audio books have changed the book market over the last few years.

Google Books and the Google Book Settlement have obviously been mired in controversy from the beginning. Just last week, Google's Sergey Brin defended the project in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. The Google Book Settlement is currently on hold, and Google has until November to present a revised version of its plan.

In his remarks, Clancy stressed that he doesn't believe that brick and mortar book retailers will die anytime soon. He did, however, argue that book retailers will have to adapt to the changing environment and start to offer digital copies of books in addition to regular print copies. In Clancy's vision, Google will "syndicate for our partner program all of the books we sell that are new, so that any bookstore can sell a Google edition and find a way that people can buy them in brick and mortar stores as well."

Clancy did stress, however, that books will always be stored in the cloud, so we are not quite sure if this means that users will basically only buy access rights to a book but won't be able to store a copy on their devices for offline reading. As most book publishers are still extremely nervous about the potential for piracy, cloud storage might indeed be a way to alleviate some of these fears for Google.

Google Editions: Readable on Any Device

Clancy also stressed that these "Google editions" should be readable on any device, including laptops, phones, and dedicated eReaders. In addition, Google wants to work with any publisher that is willing to work with Google to offer books in the Google cloud.

Of course, Google's relationship with publishers is rather rocky, so it remains to be seen how many publishers would really want to sign on to this program. At the same time, though, most publishers also aren't exactly happy with Amazon either. What is clear, though, is that Google plans to create its own cloud-based alternative to eBooks stores from established retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Thanks to E.E. Boyd from MediaBistro for transcribing Clancy's remarks.

Beginning this month on the self-publishing site lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site's most popular free content made available via the iPaper format. There will be numerous titles offered from a variety of genres including cookbooks, biographies, photo books, books about computers and Internet, and books about arts and photography. And thanks to iPaper's ability to embed AdSense ads within the documents, content creators will now have a way to offer free e-books that also have the potential to earn them an income.

Over the next three months, Lulu will test the use of Scribd's iPaper on their site, and, if all goes well, they will then explore rolling out iPaper to include more of their site's content.

The addition of Google Books as a partner is a significant one as the search giant's involvement promises to increase the public's ability to find works to share and remix. For now, CC licensed books are distinguishable by a Creative Commons logo to the left of the preview pane. In the future, licensing is likely to become an advanced search feature within the site. When that happens, remixing material will be so much easier to find.

For example, Google already prints full versions of out-of-copyright books for its Library Project. Once these books are tagged with the public domain license, thousands of out-of-copyright and sometimes out-of-print books will become easily searchable. We may see a renewed interest in our favorite classics, or see them altered in new and unusual ways. By showcasing CC licensed material, Google Books may prompt other companies like Flickr to further prioritize commons-friendly search.

If you'd like to place your Google Book under a CC license, you can do so in your account settings. To sign up to add a CC licensed work, visit the Google Books partner page