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.

A number of constituents had doubts about the agreement from the beginning. Librarians and academics, for example, fear that Google, which would basically be the only entity with a comparable license to publish these orphaned books online, would have no competition and would hence be able to charge libraries and other institutions any price it sees fit.

The Author's Guild, which is not typically known for being especially progressive, advises its members to claim their books on the Google Books Settlement site.

It is hard not to feel a bit torn about this issue. On the one hand, the prospect of having free or cheap access to this enormous repository of texts is tantalizing, while giving even more power to Google seems problematic as well. At the same time, though, few companies will be able to replicate Google's efforts (though it should be noted that this is a non-exclusive agreement), and the settlement is the closest we have come to a universal online library and a way for providing easy access to all of these books.