Some surprising news came out a few weeks ago that Microsoft was canceling their book scanning and search program.
Google’s book search continues on, and provides an opportunity to find digital copies of books online.
You can also create a library of books of your own choosing at Google, with some aspects of a virtual bookshelf built into the presentation of those books. There are a number of virtual bookshelf sites online, many with social networking features added to them, that do. I recently explored a few of them, and here are some of the ones that I came across:
- Good Reads
- Library Thing
- Shelfari
- Revish
- Bookglutton
- WhatsOnMyBookshelf
- Bibliophil
- Chain Reading
- Reader2
- BookJetty
A patent application for a virtual bookshelf program from Google was published last month, and it provides us with a chance to see how Google might integrate its book search, and Google Books Library Project with a personal library feature that allows us to show the books that we’ve read, share reviews with others, and track and find books that we might want to read in the future.