Yesterday Google rolled out MyLibrary, a new feature that lets Google Book Search fans collect and catalogue personal libraries. If that sounds a bit like Shelfari or Library Thing, you're right, but Google's MyLibrary has the edge on those two in one key are — searching your library.
MyLibrary's search is based on Google's Custom Search Engine, which means it's not without flaws, but, imagine you catalogue your whole personal library and want to find some passage, but can't remember what book it's in, MyLibrary enables just that kind of search.
The ability to search within books trumps both Shelfari and LibraryThing, however, given that Google's indexing of books is far from complete, the usefulness of this feature will depend somewhat on whether or not the books in your collection have been scanned.
MyLibrary lacks many of the features found in Library Thing and Shelfari — notably the social aspect — but you do get a public page and RSS feeds. As you expect there's also a place to write reviews, give star ratings and tag your books for improved searching (as with most of Google's offerings, tags are referred to as “labels”).
Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to read other people's reviews or see their ratings while browsing their libraries, which makes those features sort of useless.
There's an RSS feed available for your library, which you can add to Google Reader or your Google homepage. There's also a cut-and-paste link for other readers, though it pointed to the wrong URL when I tried to use it. To work around that I first added the feed to Google Reader and then went in and copied the address out of Google Reader and pasted it elsewhere.
Regrettably it doesn't seem like you can access the RSS feed from other clients — using curl from a terminal window with the same feed address I got a client permission error — which means you can't grab the data and do what you want with it. Unfortunately that means none of the popular book cataloging options on the web — Shelfari, LibraryThing or MyLibrary — offer a real API for pulling data out — where is the Flickr of books?
The MyLibrary features are a nice addition to Google Book Search and the ability to search within your own collection gives MyLibrary an instant edge over competitors, but if you like the social aspect of other sites (book recommendations, etc) MyLibrary will leave you wanting.
Still, this is an early release and if Google can get some sharing/recommendations features into MyLibrary, integrate Google Scholar with Google Book Search and offer an API for accessing data, it'll be leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
