Google Books is a great place to find all kinds of books and magazines that you can preview and or read for free online or on your ereader device. For the last couple of years I’ve been using Google Books to create lists of free books that my US History students can access for research assignments. I do that by searching for a topic in Google Books, filtering results to show only “free Google eBooks,” putting the titles on a Google Bookshelf, then sharing the link to the shelf I created. My students can then visit my bookshelf to see the books that I have recommended to them.

The slides below will walk you through how to use Google Books for the purposes of locating free books that can be read online or downloaded, searching within a book, and creating shelves to share with others. The tutorial assumes that you already have a Google account. If you don’t have a Google account I recommend creating one before going through this tutorial.

Expand the slides to full screen to see the details of the screen images.