Last year, Google launched their eBookstore with more than 3 million eBooks available for free and for purchase. These eBooks could be downloaded by users for their eBook reader devices like Amazon Kindle, Nook, Android and more. In addition to that, users could also make use of a Web Reader application to read those books from any web browser.

eBooks are a big business today and Amazon is one of the market leaders for eBook sales. In-fact, Amazon sold more eBooks than hard covers last year. Much of Amazon’s eBooks business rely on third party affiliates who link to Amazon from their website. This definitely helps them drive sales.

Google, who has been serious about the books offering are now taking a cue from them and launching an affiliate program for the eBooks store. Website owners in U.S. can now become Google eBooks affiliates and link to Google Books from their site and earn commission on any sales driven through them.

Google eBooks affiliates is a part of the Google Affiliate Network. Users of GAN can subscribe to the Google eBooks product feed and get access to links for Google Books. Alternatively, affiliates can also programmatically access the eBooks catalog using the Google Books APIs.

Google already has a huge base of publishers who make use of their Affiliate Network. This platform now gives them a readymade base of affiliates who can help drive the sales of Google Books even higher.

I was not able to confirm the commission amount that affiliates will receive when they sell Google Books. I will update this post once I am able to get hold of that information.

Google has just announced three new media related services at the Google I/O Google Books, Google Movies and Google Music.

Users can purchase any book from the Google market, and read it on any Google Books compatible device.

Android users can rent movies for 1.99$ for up to 30 days. After renting a movie and watching it for some time, users have 24 hours to watch the whole movie. Users can stream movies, in HD quality; to any device they wish to including Google TV, Android Honeycomb tablets etc.

Honeycomb based tablets will get a special app dedicated to Google Movies, with the Android 3.1 Honeycomb update. The service is also available for Android 2.2+ based handsets. Google has also added two new sections to the Android Market Books and Movies.

The Google Music service also went live, after months of speculation. The Music site is already up, and sadly the service is invitation based only. The Google Music service will allow users to stream their whole music library to their Android tablet or handset, via a Google Music app for Windows/Mac. Basically, once a user adds his music library to the Google Music app, his whole library is uploaded to the cloud.

Users can add up to 20,000 songs as well! The service will remain free, until it is in beta. Sadly, the service is only for people residing in the U.S.

Google has also released a new music app for the Android 2.2+ handsets, which can be downloaded from the Android market.

A Paris court has fined Google for breaking France’s copyright laws over displaying snippets of books in their search results. The court has fined Google €300,000 (~$430,000) to be paid to French publisher La Martiniere, which filed the court case on behalf of several other publishers.

Google Books has always been in controversy over indexing and has got into trouble in the past for indexing books without explicit permission. Google has been displeased with the court ruling and will be appealing the decision. Google were apparently upset at this decision and released a statement which said:

"French readers now face the threat of losing access to a significant body of knowledge and falling behind the rest of internet users"

In the past Google has signed deals with US publishers to index books, however, the French publishers did not take the indexing too kindly, and claimed that the indexing books was an act of reproduction and Google needs to pay them in order to do it.

It is not very clear whether Google can display those snippets in countries other than France, however the amount does not seem to be a high price to pay for Google. Initially, the French publishers had demanded 1.5 million Euros as compensation, however the actual fine is much lower than that.

Related: Download Books from Google Books | Download eBooks from Google

Image credit: stanford.edu

Google Books is a real good place to search and find books about various topics, you can search through a index of more than 7 millions books archived by Google and preview chapters from several books too.

Just like other Google products, Google Books too is actively developed to make it better. The Google Books team just released a new update to the books search engine, adding several new features to it.

Also Read: Google Book Downloader

Here are some of the features that make searching books at Google Books much more easier and better.

Thumbnail View Users can now search and browse the books using thumbnail or cover view, in which all the books will be listed out as they are in a photo gallery.

Embeds and Links Users can now embed a preview of a full view of the book on their own websites and blogs.

Improvised Book search If you are looking to search for content within a individual book, Google Books will now highlight the search term within the book and include a image from the part of the page where the search term appears.

You will also see a Previous and Next button to browse through the search hits quickly and easily.

Drop Down Menu for Content Google Books has also added a drop-down for the content that will allow you to quickly browse and jump to different chapters within a book, or articles within a magazine.

View Plain Text Version of Books Users can now view the plain text versions of public domain books.

Page Turn Button and Animation – In addition to scrolling through the book, you can now also click the page turn button at the bottom of the screen, even if you haven’t yet finished the page.

Improved Book Overview Page – On the Overview page you’ll find an assortment of useful data about the book, including reviews, ratings, summaries, related books, key words and phrases, references from the web, places mentioned in the book, publisher information, etc.

These changes definitely make using Google Books much more easier and better. What are your thoughts about the recent changes in Google Books? Let us know through your comments.

New Features On Google Books [Official Google Books Blog]

I have literally found tons of books using Google Book Search, however browsing the books online is time consuming and I would definitely want a way to download those books and read them at my leisure.

Not that we haven’t unearthed something that already does that, the Google Book Downloader for desktops is something I often use, but the software does require users to perform several steps, like finding the right book id and so on.

However I came across another easy and quicker way to download books from Google quickly and easily with the help of Firefox and Greasemonkey.

The Google Book Downloader Greasemonkey script is a surefire way to save time and quickly download books that you come across on Google Book Search.

Just install the script and you will see a link to download the books from Google Book Search.

Once you have installed the Userscript, you will see a link to download the book in the right hand side navigation, clicking on this link will give you a option to choose from which page should the book be downloaded from.

Once you have selected the page number to start from the Userscript will begin downloading the book  and save it to your hard drive create download links for the pages, clicking on which will save open the page.

Download Google Book Downloader Userscript