Via UT Austin’s Blogging Pedagogy, I learned of Google’s new service where you can clip images from Google Books and embed them into your website. Here’s some info.
I think it’s pretty handy, and provides potential for a variety of uses. John Jones at Blogging Pedagogy points out that you can show students passages from texts on your course blog, which I think is pretty cool. Also, I’m wondering how this might affect online commonplace books, or other online texts that quote and cite from others. Currently, if I want an image from a website, I use a tool like Apple’s Grab, or if I want an image from a book, I scan it in. This provides the opportunity to include various images of texts, for a neat-o “vintage” look to be used (though, for Google Books, this is limited to Public Domain texts or portions of texts that publishers allow them to include).
A passage from Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying”:
