Google Book Search: Another Way to Promote

Google sent Book Publishers Northwest the following article about their Google Book Search service. If you try the service, we would be interested in hearing about your results. Post a comment or e-mail us at bpnwnews@aol.com

Conventional wisdom says that a reader needs to know the title of a book or some other clue to find a book on the internet. But suppose a reader doesn’t know anything about a book – or even that a book exists that matches her interests?

Google Book Search is a great way to attract new readers and boost book sales – it matches people who are looking for information with the relevant words and phrases inside your titles. By matching the content in your books with user searches, Google Book Search connects your books with the people most interested in buying them. And any publisher – large or small – can join the program to market their books for free.

Through the Google Books Partner Program, publishers send their books to Google in either hard copy or digital format. Google in turn digitizes, hosts and makes searchable every word of every book we receive. As every publisher knows, browsing leads to buying, so we've made it easy for people to browse limited previews of publishers’ books in a secure environment. When you submit your books through the Partner Program, people are always able to search the full contents of your books, but you choose how much they will be able to view -- from 20 percent to 100 percent of each title. To protect your content, your book is hosted on our secure servers, and we disable print, cut, copy and save functionality. If readers decide they want to buy a book, we make it easy by providing links to online retailers and local bookstores via BookSense. If you sell your books directly from your own website, it gets top billing, appearing first in the list of purchasing links.

For more information about Google Book Search, check out this quick tour:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/book_search_tour/
or find out what other publishers have to say about their participation here:
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/success.html

To sign up for your own Google Book Search account, simply visit:
http://www.google.com/bpnwbooks

If you have any questions along the way, feel free to contact the Book Search team at
books-support@google.com.