Google allows the embedding of books

Google has released a set of tools that allows bloggers and Web designers to embed entire books in their blog posts. Though Google's Book Search has let Web cruisers flip through digitized volumes for a few years now, this embeddable technology might do for public domain books what YouTube's embeddable player did for online video. How about the utopian world where every other website you go to, someone has embedded an interesting book and turned it to just the right page so you can begin flipping through it?

This doesn't work for all books, of course. Plenty of copyrighted books come without any sort of preview (You can't read a single page of John Grisham's "The Firm," for instance), and others do strange things like omit random pages to make reading the whole thing impossible (see Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow").  But for many academic works, classics whose copyright has expired and books that were never copyrighted in the first place, the Google preview works just fine.  Try it yourself.

And after you do, read the first three chapters of "The Heart of the Internet," (after the jump) and write a 200-word summary to share with the class.

NOTE: I moved the embedded book to after the jump.  Our blogging platform (Typepad) appears to have trouble rendering the book in Internet Explorer.  It works fine in Firefox.

— David Sarno