Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Mashup Made in Heaven: Google Maps Books

While I'm not a big fan of Google's plan to capture all the world's books and put them online, even I will admit that there's a pretty cool feature they offer. Search for a title, then click the "About this book" link. Down towards the bottom of the page is a section called "Places mentioned in this book" where the cities and other places mentioned in the text of the book are laid out on a Google map.

For example, here are the towns from On the Road (scroll down to see the maps). And here are the locations from (shameless plug here) Tim Flannery's The Eternal Frontier. Not all books listed at Google have maps, but looking for those that do can easily kill a few slow hours online. Beware.--David E

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