Google announced a new set of partnerships and tools to bring even more books to the people who are looking for them. They've partnered with booksellers like Books-a-Million, Buy.com, and Borders.com to allow their customers to browse previews of books right on the retailer's website. When you see a book that looks promising, you can now click on "Google Preview" to browse through the book just as you might in the physical store, without ever having to leave Books-A-Million's website.

Google also released a powerful set of APIs, which make it easier for web developers and site owners to enable this functionality on their own sites, as well. Now you can embed in a site any book available at Google Book Search. You can add a fully-functional widget using this code:

<script src="http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js" type="text/javascript"></script>&lt;script type="text/javascript" src="http://books.google.com/books/previewlib.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;<br />&lt;script type="text/javascript"&gt;<br />GBS_insertEmbeddedViewer('GkCpLIk7aisC',600,500);<br />&lt;/script&gt;

where you should replace GkCpLIk7aisC with the corresponding book ID, which can be obtained from the URL.

“As on the Book Search site itself, you can search within the book, zoom in and out on the page, and browse up to 20% of the book,” The new widget is already used by online catalogs like WorldCat.org and social book sites like weRead to preview books.