Google mashes up Books with Maps

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The Google Book Search team has employed the Google Maps API to marry locations mentioned in books to a map! Here is an excerpt from a recent Google Book Search Blog post:

Our team has begun to animate the static information found in books by organizing a sample of locations from them on an interactive Google Map, with snippets of text from the book, and links to the actual pages where the locations are mentioned. When our automatic techniques determine that there are a good number of quality locations from a book to show you, you'll find a map on the "About this book" page."

Fact, fiction, old, and new – we seek to present maps when helpful across all kinds of books. Here are a few more to explore:

• Around the World in Eighty Days
• The 9/11 Commission Report
• Girl with Curious Hair
• Miles from Nowhere: A Round the World Bicycle Adventure
• War and Peace
• Bach: A Biography
• The Travels of Marco Polo
• "A Problem from Hell": America and The Age of Genocide

(From: The 9/11 Commission Report)

Give this a try for yourself at Google Book Search!

I've previously introduced you to this mashup concept of "Book Maps Mashups"; real locations mentioned in books, mashed up with Google Maps. A great example of this concept in action is The Atlas of Fiction. It places references on a Google Map of real places that fiction writers have placed in their stories. Their site explains: "..From Dickens' London to Joyce's Dublin to the New York of Edith Wharton and Henry James, great writers have borrowed the associations and resonances of real-world places to lend color and depth to their works. Get new insight into the geography of your favorite writer's works; or you can see what writers have drawn inspiration from your own home town, and maybe even your own street."

Here is a short list of other new Book Maps:

Google Mapping the Napoleonic age of sail books by Patrick O'Brian - Fantastic mashup showing ports of call and a sequential mapping tour through each of the book's locations.
Book Sale Scout - Maps locations of listed book sales.
Book Crossing Maps - A Google Maps mashup showing the travels of a book based on its public "BCID" number.
Google Map of Indie Booksellers
Littourati Blog - Mapping places in books [Thanks to Jim Parsons]

For more Google Maps Book Maps Mashups, check this recent roundup post or watch the Book Maps category from here on Google Maps Mania!

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