Google just announced that all the content from Google Books is now searchable from the Search Options panel the company introduced earlier this year. Until today, users could only use the Search Options panel to restrict searches to videos, forums, and reviews. This move should give Google Books a boost in visibility. It will also make it easier for users to search for books and magazines right from Google’s default search page. There have been some rumors that Google plans to sell eBooks on Google Books by the end of this. Maybe this is a step in that direction.
While Google is obviously caught up in a broad controversy around its Google Books project and, more specifically, the Google Books settlement, the company is clearly dedicated to making Google Books a standard feature of its search business. The company continues to add new features to Google Books and just yesterday, Google announced a partnership that will allow On Demand Books to print books from Google’s archive of public domain books on its Espresso Book machines and turn them back into paperbacks.
For now, this new feature is only available in the United States, though according to a blog post on the Google Book Search blog, the company plans to make this feature “available elsewhere in the future.”
