Do you ever find wonderful information in a book on the Google Books website, only to quickly become discouraged because you can’t figure out how to print a page of the book and you don’t want to spend a lot of time transcribing the information in it? I have, and I’m guessing many others feel that way too. A few weeks ago I noticed two extremely useful functions on Google Books that are now available for all books in the public domain: the the ‘Plain text’ tool and the ‘Clip’ tool. These tools are especially pertinent to genealogists because many books that Google Books has digitized are family histories, parish register transcripts, and other useful genealogy-related volumes.  Remember that these tools only apply to books that are in the public domain, which means that they are not available for books that are still under copyright.

When you look at a book on Google Books, check for the links found in the upper right corner of the page. If the book is in the public domain, you’ll find these options:  Plain Text, Clip, Link, Feedback, and PDF.

Plain Text: If you want to copy the text of a book, all you have to do is click on the “Plain text” link and it will automatically change the book from PDF to plain text format. You can then select the text you want to copy, hit Ctrl+C (the copy function), and paste it (Ctrl+V) into another document. You can also highlight the text you want, right-click with your mouse and select “copy.” Then you can right-click, select “paste” from the menu and paste it into another document.

Clipping:  If you want to print a portion of the book in its digitized form, but you don’t want to download the entire book, click on the “Clip” link. Using your cursor, select the text that you want to clip. Once you’ve made your selection, a box will pop up at the bottom of the page with the options to translate the selected text, copy a link to that text, or embed it. Copy the URL of the box that says “Image” and then paste it into the address bar of your web browser. (You will probably want to open another tab or another window.) Then the section you selected will have its own specific webpage, and you can print that page. One great aspect of the Clip feature is that it allows you to select an entire page to be copied. The Print Screen function that every web browser has will make a copy of what is on your screen, but it will not allow you to copy anything that is not showing on the screen.

I hope these tips are useful to you in your genealogical adventures on Google Books. Happy Holidays, and happy clipping to you!