Discover more than 3 million Google eBooks from your choice of booksellers and devices

Google eBooks :To improve access to the cultural and educational treasures we term them as books. Google eBooks will be available in the U.S. from a new Google eBookstore. You can browse and search through the largest ebooks collection in the world with more than three million titles including hundreds of thousands for sale. Find the latest bestsellers like James Patterson’s Cross Fire and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, dig into popular reads like Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken and catch up on the classics like Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Gulliver’s Travels. We designed Google eBooks to be open. Many devices are compatible with Google eBooks—everything from laptops to netbooks to tablets to smartphones to e-readers. With the new Google eBooks Web Reader, you can buy, store and read Google eBooks in the cloud. That means you can access your ebooks like you would messages in Gmail or photos in Picasa—using a free, password-protected Google account with unlimited ebooks storage. In addition to a full-featured web reader, free apps for Android and Apple devices will make it possible to shop and read on the go. For many books you can select which font, font size, day/night reading mode and line spacing suits you—and pick up on the page where you left off when switching devices. You can discover and buy new ebooks from the Google eBookstore or get them from one of our independent bookseller partners: Powell’s, Alibris and participating members of the American Booksellers Association. You can choose where to buy your ebooks like you choose where to buy your print books, and keep them all on the same bookshelf regardless of where you got them. When Google Books first launched in 2004, we set out to make the information stored in the world’s books accessible and useful online. Since then, we’ve digitized more than 15 million books from more than 35,000 publishers, more than 40 libraries, and more than 100 countries in more than 400 languages. This deep repository of knowledge and culture will continue to be searchable throughGoogle Books search in the research section alongside the ebookstore. Launching Google eBooks is an initial step toward giving you greater access to the vast variety of information and entertainment found in books. Our journey has just begun...

Facebook Planning Email Service Launch

Facebook is hosting a special media event on Monday, November 15, where the company is expected to introduce its own email service code named Project Titan. The service apparently includes a full-on Web-based email client and will give Facebook subscribers their own @faceboom.com email address,according to TechCrunch.

Facebook email may be on the way

Facebook isn’t saying yet what it plans to announce at its press event, but the invitations do hint strongly towards an email or message-related service. If the social networking company does in fact roll out a new email service, it could include features such as the ability to prioritize messages based who you interact with most on Facebook.

Assuming a new email service is on the way, that could account for a recent dispute between Facebook and Google over accessing contacts from Google Gmail user accounts. Google blocked Facebook users from moving their Gmail contacts to the social networking service, but a workaround has already surfaced that lets Facebook users get at their Gmail contacts.

Facebook isn’t dropping any more hints about its Monday event, so for now word that a new email service will be launched should be considered speculation.

Google Chrome Beta Can 'Prerender' Web Pages

One of the most recent builds of the Google Chrome browser offers support for an intriguing new feature: "prerendering" of Web pages, offering even faster Web browsing by guessing which pages you'll visit next.

In the 9.0.576.0 build and subsequent versions of Chrome for Windows and Linux, the new build "add[s] support for page prerendering", according to the changelog. The feature had previously been part of the open-source Chromium technology. The new Chrome build is part of the Chrome beta channel, and users who use the standard "stable" Chrome builds must download the beta version.

The concept of prerendering should be something like a "crystal ball," where Chrome predicts which site a user will visit next, preloads it, and then delivers the content almost instantly. In the "about:flags" section, prerendering is described as "speculatively prerenders complete webpages in the background for a faster browsing experience". It is turned off by default.

A Google spokesman characterized prerendering as "an experiment". "While we are always working to improve the speed of Google Chrome, this particular feature is still an experimental idea that is in the very early phases of development," he said in email. "Over the coming months we plan to work on prototyping the feature in Chromium builds behind a flag to test out various approaches and see if this is a feasible way to improve browser speed."

In a sense, Google already launched a similar feature on Tuesday, the same day as the prerendering feature went live. Then, Google launched Google Instant Previews, which preloads a portion of the page when a special "magnifying glass" icon is clicked.

"We match your query with an index of the entire Web, identify the relevant parts of each Web page, stitch them together and serve the resulting preview completely customized to your search—usually in under one-tenth of a second," Raj Krishnan, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post describing Google Instant Previews. "Once you click the magnifying glass, we load previews for the other results in the background so you can flip through them without waiting."

Whether or not the feature actually works at this point is uncertain. ConceivablyTech, which tested the feature, found that, when turned on, the feature seemed to improve the load times of Web pages, but not consistently, with most improvements confined to smaller, less efficiently coded sites. It's also not clear which Web sites or links Chrome will choose to pre-load, although hovering over an HTML link would seem to be a good indicator that a user intends to click on it.

In informal PCMag.com tests, I found that some Web sites, such as Engadget, seemed to load more quickly than others. ReadWriteWeb for example, seemingly loaded slightly slower when using the new Chrome build. ConceivablyTech also noted a small spike in traffic when hovering over a link; I did a few times, but not consistently.

Loading a Web page often depends on pulling information from several different servers to load ads and other modules, however, and it's unclear how deep Google goes in loading this data. It's also unclear whether, even enabled, the new technology is even turned on.

Google representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

The beta Chrome browser also includes performance enhancements like "Snap Start," which enables an experimental TLS extension which removes a round trip from HTTPS handshakes, supposedly increasing performance. Verbatim Instant also makes the address bar load URLs as you type suggestions into it.

Other experimental features include the ability to toggle between top and side tabs and to also disable outdated plugins that may have known security vulnerabilities.