The Collectors Weekly Answer Desk
(actually C&P Tel. operators, 1951)

How does the book search on your site work?

Many of our category pages have a ‘Books’ tab, which when clicked, shows books related to that collecting category. The data for this page is provided by Google’s Book Search project, which you can read more about here.

Please be aware that we don’t (and can’t) hand-pick the specific books which appear on these pages; rather, we give Google a set of search keywords (e.g. ‘Eames furniture’), and they send us, via their programming interface, the list of books they think are most appropriate (it works well about 85% of the time, but there are some random results too).

At the top of each books page is a preview window which allows you to actually scroll through the pages of the first search result which has a ‘preview’ provided by Google. The preview can include some or all of the book, depending on Google’s arrangement with the publisher.

Further down the page are thumbnails of more books. If they have the ‘Google Preview’ button next to them, you can click that button and the preview will appear in the window at the top of the page (please note that this feature does not work in Internet Explorer 6). If not, you can click on the book cover image and it will take you to a page on Google with additional information about that title.

We like Google Book Search because there are many categories where Google has digitized public domain, out of print, or other primary materials extremely useful to collectors, such as old manufacturers catalogs. It can be a quick way to get deep knowledge in a specific collecting area, without a trip to the library.


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