Google Books Gets Bookshelves, a New Homepage

Google has unveiled a redesigned Google Books homepage and also introduced a couple of new features to its rather controversial product. The feature themselves are a welcome addition, but the timing of the update is interesting for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, Apple has just unveiled its iPad tablet which has books and magazines as one of its main draws. On the other hand, the deadline for any objections to the revised Google Books settlement with authors and publishers is looming.

"I'm happy to announce a few fresh features for Google Books. We've updated the home page by adding the ability to scroll through categories of books and magazines," Brandon Badger, product manager for Google Books, wrote. The homepage now lists several categories, grouping books with similar topics or the ones which are the most popular at any given time. Categories include "Interesting," "Magazines," "Classics," "Games," "Cooking" and so on.

"We also integrated the My Library feature into the home page to enable you to create and then share collections of books by adding them to 'bookshelves.' This new version of My Library gives you control over your collections by enabling you to keep some bookshelves private--if, say, you want to organize your own personal reading lists--while sharing others," he also announced.

The My Library feature got a though rework. For one, it is now featured in the homepage above the listed categories allowing easy access to the books you plan to your favorite books or the ones you plan to read. Google also dropped the label system it used for the books for a form of "virtual bookshelves." For the most part, these work just like the labels, you can add a book to one or more bookshelves depending on how you want to catalog them. By default, there are five bookshelves and you can also create new ones. All the existing labels you may have for your books will also be automatically converted to bookshelves.