See where reading takes you

People who love to read and long for a visual guide to locations referenced in a book will salute a small effort by Google to add mapping links to results produced at Books.Google.com. Google Book Search, officially still a beta project, allows people to scan and search the contents of more than 10,000 books in the public domain.

Recently the Google Book team has started, on a small scale, to add a map to the “about this book” page that highlights the key locations the writer is describing.

One obvious example is “The Travels of Marco Polo.” Go to Books.Google.com and search that title. In the result click on “about this book” and it will open a page. At the lower right is the Google Map listing the key sites mentioned in the book.

A few other titles that have been indexed for maps include “The 9/11 Commission Report,” “Girl with Curious Hair,” “Bach: A Biography” and “War and Peace.”