Technology Tips: Your GoogleBooks Library

At the GoogleBooks website, you can find hundreds of thousands of books online, including many "Full View" books. When a book is listed as "Full View" that means you can read the entire book online, or you can download a copy of the book in PDF to read offline on your computer, or to print out.

For this assignment, you will find a "Full View" book that is of interest to you, and save that book to your "Google Books Bookshelf." Most of the "Full View" books are books in the public domain, meaning that they were published in the early 20th-century or previously - so you will not find new books this way, but you can find lots of wonderful old books, all for free. I have built up a library of 1000 books from the Renaissance and early modern period (here's a 17th-century Aesop, for example) that I use in my academic research. These are books that we do not have in the OU Library, and which are often not found in any American library at all - but I have copies of all of them, free, thanks to GoogleBooks.

STEP ONE: Log on to Gmail. Log on to your Google Gmail account first. You need to be logged on in order to save the books that you find to your Google Books Library.

STEP TWO: Search for books. After you are logged on at Google, go to the GoogleBooks website and search for something that interests you. Make sure you search for FULL-VIEW books only. You can type something in the Search box to search for, or you can use the Advanced Book Search option. For example, these are the results of a search for Full-View books using the search term Cherokee.

STEP THREE: View and save a book. After you have found a book that interests you, click on the book cover (or the title link) so that you can view the book. You can browse through the pages or search through the book. To save the book to your GoogleBooks Library, click on the "Add to bookshelf" link that you see in the left-hand column of the screen:

STEP FOUR: After you have saved at least one book to your Library, click on the My Library link which you will find in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. There are all kinds of things you can do there in your Library, tagging the books, searching the books you have saved, editing your Google profile if you want, etc. Here is a screenshot of my GoogleBooks Library and you can visit my Library page here, at the address shown in the browser address bar:

http://books.google.com/books?uid=11474406259561102151

STEP FIVE: Send email. To complete this assignment you need to send me the webpage address of your GoogleBooks Library. Just cut and paste the webpage address you see in the browser bar when you are inside your Library; it should look something like the address you can see for my GoogleBooks Library above. Make sure you use this subject line: TechTip GoogleBooks.

When you have sent in the email, you can do the Gradebook Declaration for Extra Credit. Here is the text of the Gradebook Declaration you will complete: