Google has announced the launch of a number of new features on its Google Book Search service.According to the search engine, the developments will allow users to "go beyond search" and collect, discover and share new books.
It will now be possible to create a personal collection of books on Google Book Search and use it to locate a desired book from that collection for any given occasion.
Other people will also be able to view these personal libraries, enabling users to share information and to browse other collections.
Another new feature, named Popular Passages, will allow people to discover connections between books by entering quotations and seeing if they appear in other tomes.
Google Book Search also now includes a way to allow users to select, copy and embed sections of public domain books in web pages.
Product manager at the search engine Adam Mathes commented: "We hope to make it as easy to blog and quote from a book as it is from any web page."
He added that Google hopes "these new features help [users] discover, collect and share some of the great truths just waiting to be discovered (or maybe re-discovered) in the great ocean of books before [them]".
Google has also recently added StarOffice to its free software bundle. It includes word processing, presentations, graphics, spreadsheets, database applications and a catalogue of 3D effects and images.
