Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006
Google Book Search gets an Ajax upgrade
Nathan Naze and his team at Google have upgraded Google Books:
- Zoom in on text and images. Here’s a cool full-page sketch of a ship from an 1898 book on steam navigation. Looking for something less dated? Perhaps this colorful page of a room from a book on interior design. Want a better look? You can now zoom in and out — just click on the
and
buttons. Play with it until you find a size you like.
- One book, one web page. No more reloads! In one-page mode (just click the
button), pages appear one below the other, like a scroll of paper. For full-view books, there’s also a two-page mode (
) in which pages appear side by side, just like in a physical book (perfect for two-page images). In both modes, you’ll be able to use
and
to turn pages.
- Scroll, scroll, scroll your book… using the scrollbar or your mouse wheel, or by dragging (in most browsers, you’ll see a
). You can also use the keyboard (try the spacebar, page up, page down, and the arrow keys). Or you can click on a link in the table of contents or your search results to jump right to that page (like this photo from the 1906 book Geronimo’s Story of His Life).
- This page was made for reading. We’ve tried to tidy up the clutter to leave as much room as possible for what’s important — the book. We’ve put all the information about the book in a scrollable side menu. Still not enough room? You can put the screen in fullscreen mode with
, so you can use the whole window for browsing. Try it with a nice illustrated book of Celtic fairy tales or, for some lighter reading, electromagnetic wave theory.
There are keystrokes here too, such as hitting space to scroll down (moving down smoothly). It is nice to see more and more unification to Google apps these days. When you use Reader it feels like Mail, etc.
One question is, where are the GWT apps? :)
4.4 rating from 21 votes
I want to know how does google implement the effect like acrobat reader?
I use DOM Inspector to view the google book reader’s DOM structure,but at book page field ,I just found a tag that src point to current page url…
Who could tell me how does google implement the book page srolling effect?
It’s just a div block with a bunch of page-sized div blocks inside. As they become visible, they load.
[...] En el primero ahora se puede hacer zoom sobre el texto y las imágenes, leer los libros a 1 página o a doble página, hacer scroll y el libro que estamos leyendo ocupa más espacio que antes, quedando toda la información en una sidebar al margen. [Via Ajaxian] [...]
This is an absolut great idea for students or people in the book business. I studied litteratur at university and was craving something like this. Enough of that why was it so impressive? Is Ajaxian a google company or is google just the media darlings? Whats the fuzz about?
Bjørn Jensen
Team Orca
http://www.orcadesktop.com
Ajaxian is a ripe takeover target for Google. pass it on.
It does not work in FF 1.5.0.8!
Throws the error in compressed code: “i.createElement is not a function”.
Does anybody see this too?
[...] Are you a book worm? You don’t have to admit, but if you’re one, then you should visit Google’s Book Search the next time you’re planning to get or read an ebook. Dion Almaer recently shared some interesting reviews about the recent Ajax upgrade of Google book search on Ajaxian.com. [...]
[...] 好了，接下æ¥äº²èº«æ„Ÿå—一下这美妙的阅读体验å§ã€‚(æ¥æº) 归类于： Google — Jackie @ 11:28 pm [...]
great powerful tool, already. now ajax makes it quicker and easier :D