Dictionary Support For Google eBooks But Papers Go

Google has abandoned its plan to archive the world’s newspapers but it is still developing its eBookstore. On May 19, the company boosted it eBooks offering , adding the ability for users to get definitions of words, translate them to another language, and search within a digital book.

Google eBooks is the company’s commercial digital book service. The search engine opened Google eBookstore the last December, offering users access to more than three million titles, including two million free titles. Consumers may read these works through a Web browser on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

A Word Of Explanation

Little has been heard from Google about eBooks until these new improvements, which will enable users to look up words with which they are unfamiliar, translate them and search for other words without losing their digital page within the work.

This all happens in Google’s Web Reader in the browser so users no longer have to download books the way they do for the Amazon Kindle or Apple’s iBookstore on the iPad. Double-click or highlight text within the Web Reader, reveals a pop-up menu that lets users choose to Define, Translate, Search Book, Search Google or Search Wikipedia.

It is important to note that these features work only in Google’s “Flowing text” mode, not the “Scanned pages” mode. Users may switch to “Flowing text” in the Web Reader by clicking on the Settings menu labelled “Aa” and picking it under the “Show” drop-down menu.

When a user selects the Define option, the pop-up menu offers a definition of the word via Google Dictionary.

Users may click on the audio icon to the left of the word they want define to hear the definition pronounced aloud. To leave the page, a user may select “More” to go to the Google Dictionary page for the word.

The Translate option will let users translate a single word or several sentences of content into dozens of languages, with the translated text displayed in the pop-up window.

Search Book will bring up all the instances in which the selected text appears in the book, and take the user there once they click on it.

However, users may still conduct book searches by clicking on the magnifying glass icon in the upper right-hand corner of the Web Reader.

Undefined Readership Figures

Google’s new features, which one can argue should have been available upon the service’s roll out late last year, will be welcomed by eBooks users but it is unclear how many there are because Google has declined to say.

The user statistics are certainly dwarfed by the hugely popular book services from Amazon and Apple. Amazon just said its Kindle e-books are outselling printed works on its Website.

Although Google is improving eBooks it is shuttering development for it Google News Archive, the service for scanning the world’s newspapers online.

Google told the Boston Phoenix: “Users can continue to search digitised newspapers at archivesearch, but we don’t plan to introduce any further features or functionality to the Google News Archives and we are no longer accepting new microfilm or digital files for processing.”