I recently wrote about Google Book Search, and recently they announced that they’ve improved the process of browsing their book collection. Here are some highlights of the improvements.

* Zoom in on text and images. Here’s a cool full-page sketch of a ship from an 1898 book on steam navigation. Looking for something less dated? Perhaps this colorful page of a room from a book on interior design. Want a better look? You can now zoom in and out — just click on the zoom in and zoom out buttons. Play with it until you find a size you like.

* One book, one web page. No more reloads! In one-page mode (just click the one page button), pages appear one below the other, like a scroll of paper. For full-view books, there’s also a two-page mode (two page button) in which pages appear side by side, just like in a physical book (perfect for two-page images). In both modes, you’ll be able to use previous page button and next page button to turn pages.

* More on this (and other) books. Find other books that interest you. Just click on “About this book” to find more books related to the book you’re reading. If the book How to Draw Comic Book Heroes and Villains interests you, you’ll probably like Comic Book Artist Collection, Vol. 1. We also revised our “About this book” page to provide better information for in-copyright books, from which you can just see short snippets or a limited preview.

* Explore citations and references. You can also find other books that refer to your book of interest. If scholarly works from Google Scholar have references to the book, you’ll see them too. As an example, see what other works have referred to Aristotle’s works or the 1922 book All About Coffee.

For more information on using Google Book Search, see my article, Genealogy Research With Google Book Search.