A New Google Data API for Book Search

Posted by Guillaume Poncin, Google Book Search Team

To complement today's launch of the Embedded Viewer API, we are happy to announce a new Google Data API for Google Book Search.

The Book Search Data API lets your application perform full-text searches across our complete Book Search index. In addition to basic information about each book, you can use the results to link to book previews, show to cover thumbnails, and more.

And since a large part of joy of reading or looking for books lies in the sharing of that experience with others, we are also providing access to the social features of Google Book Search. The API lets your application retrieve and submit user ratings and reviews, and build personal My Library collections for your users. And because a picture is worth a thousand words, here is a quick snapshot of the features that the API supports, from search to rating a book:



Finally, to make the Data API easy to integrate into your application, we are launching a Java client library complete with code samples and documentation. We hope the Data API, together with the Embedded Viewer, will lead to many exciting, engaging, and educational applications built atop this rich corpus of books.

For more details on today's announcement, as well as a peek at who's already started to use these APIs, check out our post on the Book Search Blog.