Google has just come out with their Google Book Search in beta form. The popular search engine has applied its specialty to e-book cataloging and is now helping Internet users to find books on-line. The project was first announced in 2004 in conjunction with a number of research libraries (both national and international) in order to make collections available on the Web.

With a number of titles at your mercy, you can now browse, search and buy; read previews, collect cataloging info, learn about the publisher and contribute your collection. Yes, the Google-catalogue is also an open resource for contributions. It’s an option for authors and publishers to gain visibility by posting up their books.

It’s the ultimate-virtual-multi-lingual-book-search-cataloguing system for “fiction, non-fiction, reference, scholarly, textbooks, children's books, scientific, medical, professional, [and] educational� titles.

What does this have to do with our PDF world?, you ask. Google is using the PDF format for book downloads, making the scanned PDF books printable and readable (not to mention, also convertible) offline.

What will you find? How do you find it?

It works just like an ordinary Google search. Type in your search term and click on Search. The book view will open in your browser once the book is selected. For PDF downloads, file sizes will vary depending on the length of the book and seeing as how most books will be above 100 pages, you might be deterred with a MB file size.

Viewers supported include Adobe Reader 7.0, xpdf and Foxit reader. Also necessary to remember: visual quality will also vary depending upon the condition of the book’s print, which means older, rarer editions may be of low quality.

However, before you go searching to own free editions of every book you’ve wanted to read, there is a catch. Because of copyright issues, most recent and in-copy right editions aren’t available for PDF download.

So if you’re looking to download a full version of, say, a Harry Potter book, don’t hold your breath— being a bookworm myself, I’ve tried. (In my defense, I’ve also tried a few other titles, authors and literary critics as well).

To get around this, Google presents search results with different views: Limited preview, snippet, no preview and full views. Full views of books exist for those books whose copyrights are expired or aren’t subjected to any, aka “public domain� books. This means books published before 1923 in the US and for outside the U.S., public domain is defined by local laws.

These are the books that are available to you via PDF. Click on the “Full view books� button before you execute a search to find the available selection of PDF’d public domain books for your title.

Last thoughts

The book as PDF. . . Google as e-catalogue. . . and the world as library. . . . Now that’s a library with a good working selection.