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Sharing books on Google+

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Google+ users -- you know who you are -- can share links to books with their friends. Particularly those that appear in Google Books. Many of these are available to purchase as ebooks.

Google explains how it’s done:

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Simply click on the Google+ Share box on the About the Book page or in a Google Books preview, enter your message, then select which circles you’d like to share details about the book with, and click “share”. The book cover, description and title linking back to the Google Books About the Book page will appear in your Google+ stream with your message.

I was hoping this sharing might work like a Kindle, which allows users to post sentences from books they’ve been reading to Twitter or Facebook. So I found a really good sentence from ‘Southern California: An Island on the Land’ to share with friends to prove what a terrific writer Carey McWilliams was -- but the sentence-sharing function isn’t part of Google Books, at least not yet, and with this book it wasn’t possible to copy and paste. Which means book sharing in Google+ is getting there, but it still has some catching up to do.

Meanwhile, here are a few sentences from Carey McWillilams’ excellent 1973 book ‘Southern California: An Island on the Land.

After 1920 a new heterogenous tide of migrants brought still further cultural changes to Los Angeles. The motion-picture industry attracted odd and freakish types: dwarfs, pygmies, one-eyed sailors, showpeople, misfits, and 50,000 wonder-struck girls. The easy money of Hollywood drew pimps, gamblers, racketeers, and confidence men. The increasing fame of Southern California lured much of the wealth of the Coolidge prosperity to the region. The settled wealth of the great packing-house, plumbing, plate-glass, automobile, and agricultural implement families descended on Pasadena and Santa Barbara, while the parvenue element built up Hollywood and Beverly Hills. While many people came in this wave of migration, the majority of the migrants were lower middle class: the lumpenproletariat of Los Angeles, the Okies of Bell Gardens, the Arkies of Monterey Park.... The village began to disappear and the city, at last, to emerge.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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