Any self-respecting online book site should have that feature. Editorial reviews aren’t enough. A book lover needs to know if the author’s writing style goes with the reader’s reading style. We also need to know if the content really matches the hype surrounding the book.

So, let’s not judge a book by its covers. Here are five websites that let you read sample chapters and excerpts online.

Google Books

Google Books like the other services from Google is almost in your face. So, why not use it its preview (limited or full) feature to the hilt. Google Books has a great full-text book search and its Library Project where it partners with some of the best libraries in the world will make book search only better. There are nearly 20,000 publishers and authors under the umbrella of Google Books and most titles give you a handful of pages to check out before you decide to buy the book or save it for a better one.  Also, from what’s being heard, very soon out-of-print books will also be made available for preview and purchase through Google Books. Not all books will give you a preview, but the ones that do are worth a turn of the page.

Amazon

The other great name when it comes to books and sundry other items. Amazon has turned an upward curve with Kindle and eBooks. If you are a regular on Amazon’s online bookstore, you couldn’t have missed the “Look Inside” link just above the book covers. The little sticker is a part of Amazon’s Search Inside program. The tool allows you to search and browse millions of books across Amazon.com. You can set up a search based on every word and key phrase inside a book, not just for the book title or the author. As the screenshot shows, there are many ways to look into the content of a book. Then you can dive into Amazon Reader, and preview publisher-provided sample pages, go to linked book sections, or look for all references to a term or phrase.

Book Daily

Book Daily is specifically about book samples for book lovers. With 80,000 books and their first chapters on offer, I would say that this is a great site to bookmark if you want to grab hold of clues on what to read next. One of our readers mentioned it in the comments on my previous article – 5 Websites That Alert Book Lovers About New Book Releases. The site is slick and uncluttered, so grab a mug of coffee, open up a book and read the first chapter. By the end of it, you would have found that if it’s a page turner.

DailyLit

DailyLit is another book site you should bookmark, not only because it is one of the few that lets you read books by email, but also because the book site also gives you many titles for free. Their sponsorship program enables them to do that and send you scheduled emails so that you can finish a copyrighted book from your inbox. Unlike book sites with sample chapters, DailyLit really takes you through the whole hog of finishing a book in installments.

Harper Collins

Try before you buy, goes the catchphrase of this well-known publisher’s Browse Inside service. The sneak peek tool lets you flip pages starting from the table of contents, search inside,  and also share it with friends if you like the book. The tool is just as cool as the one from Amazon – in fact I found it to be slicker.

Online previews replicate the feeling of paging through a book in a bookstore. Well, not exactly, because sometimes you have a cup of coffee to go along with it. I am not complaining because online book stores give you some social joys but they can’t win all the battles when it comes to the convenience of buying and reading books. If you are a book lover, what’s your take on this? Do you know of any other book preview websites?

This post will hopefully make your web image searching and browsing even more fun: the three addons listed will let you easily zoom the image thumbnails in to quicker choose one from search results.

Let’s see how we can quickly preview thumbnails in search results, download any image in its original size and preview your contacts’ Facebook photos right from your dashboard:

Thumbnail Zoom

Thumbnail Zoom is a fun addon that lets preview thumbnail pictures on Facebook, Twitter, Google Picasa, DeviantART, PhotoBucket, Flickr, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, YouTube, Google Images and a few other popular services Any supported site can be enabled or disabled using the toolbar menu and the addon settings dialog.

The addon also adds an extra context right-click menu item that allows to download the enlarged image without ever opening it.

The options panel lets you disable any of the supported services as well as set the delay before displaying the image and its opacity:

Cool Previews

CoolPreviews is the multi-feature FireFox addon that lets you preview any linked content including images. The image preview panel enables you to:

• Zoom the image in or out;
• Open the linked image in the separate tab;
• Email the current link;
• Play all the images on the page in the slideshow (works especially well for popular image search services like Flickr, Google Images, etc)

You can also turn previews on/off on specific sites anytime by clicking the icon on the status bar (or for those who have no status bar in FireFox 4, the same settings can be accessed in Tools -> Addons). CoolPreviews will memorize your settings.

The “Settings” dialog lets you customize your image previewing experience in many ways:

• Set when you want the preview panel to appear: on mouse-over, on clicking the CoolPreviews icon, on mouse-over + CTRL key;
• Set the location of the preview panel (relative to the cursor or the link);
• Control the speed (how fast you want the preview panel to appear)
• Set the theme (dark or ice);

Additional fun features:

• Temporarily bookmark images to the right column with “stacks” feature;
• Scroll Google Image search results on an “infinite 3D Wall” (Cooliris addon required).
• Preview multiple thumbnails simultaneously without (mouse over subsequent images on a page while the preview window is open or pinned).

Obviously, there’s no point in using the above two addons simultaneously, so you should pick one.

Facebook PhotoZoom

Facebook PhotoZoom only works for Facebook, but I am sure most of the readers frequent the site, so they’ll find the addon very useful. The tool works as a magnifier for Facebook thumbnails (both profile pictures and album photos): when you hover over a thumbnail, a tooltip will appear with the bigger image in it.

They have a few reported issues (some people experience problems making it work on Windows), but I’ve had no such issues.

Do you have any more tips for better thumbnail preview in FireFox? Are you aware of any similar tools for other browsers?

I’ve used the Google preview option before, but never really found the time to really dig into how much time the right website preview solution could save. Basically, I was too busy to discover how much time I could save – as ironic as that sounds. That is, until I discovered CoolPreview.

Using The CoolPreviews Firefox Plugin

Once you install the CoolPreviews plugin, the link preview feature is ready to go. Also, unlike Google Instant Preview, the CoolPreviews plugin will give you a link preview window everywhere you go on the Internet, regardless of what website you’re on. All you have to do is hover your mouse over any link at all, and you’ll see the CoolPreviews icon show up.

Hover your mouse over that icon, and the preview “window” pops up and shows you the webpage in a scrollable format. It’s actually like having an embedded browser window inside the existing browser window. You can explore the page, click on links and check out the site without ever leaving the current page that you’re on. If you like what you see, just click the button at the top of the window to open the site in a new tab. Don’t like it? Just close the window.

If you don’t want to bother with opening and closing the preview window every time you want to see a link, just click on the pin icon at the upper right corner of the screen and the preview window will stay available.

Just slide the preview window down to the corner of your browser window, and it’ll show you a quick preview of every link you hover your mouse over – a fast and easy way to browse the web from one browser window. Gone are the days of opening tab after tab just to check links.

As you browse through the Internet in one tab, you just glide your mouse over each link, glance at the site in the website preview pane, move on the the next link, and keep on rolling until you see the page that has the information you want. Then you can click to open it in a new tab (or just navigate the page from the preview window itself!)

It’s also really easy to customize the behavior and appearance of the preview window by clicking on the settings button. Change when the preview window appears, where it shows up on the browser window, and even the theme of the preview window.

Additional Features

Another really useful feature of CoolPreviews is the Google Images feature. When you search Google Images and hover your mouse over an image, a preview of the picture in its actual size will show up in the CoolPreviews window. If you want to see all of the images from the Google Image results in a clean and convenient slideshow gallery, just click on the Play button.

A large slideshow window will open with the selected image in the center pane, and a navigation slider at the bottom. Just click the arrow to browse through all of the Google Image results.

Another really cool feature of CoolPreviews is the Temporary Bookmark Stack. If you find a cool site that you want to bookmark for future reading, just tap the “Stack” button, and the add-on will toss the URL into a virtual stack of webpages.

You’ll see a small tab attached to the right side of the browser window which you can tap on to explore your stack of bookmarks whenever you like.

What’s the point of “temporary” bookmarks? Well, have you ever been researching a particular subject, and you wanted to just fly through search results and save the URL’s for deeper reading later? Basicaly, CoolPreviews lets you do three steps in one. You do a Google Search, hover over the links to see a page preview, and when you see something useful, you can bookmark it to read later. You can do all three steps with a single click.

CoolPreviews converted me to the world of “link previews” – and I’ve already started cutting down a lot of time off my research efforts. I’m confident it’ll do the same for you. Give it a try and let us know how you liked it in the comments section below!

Plugging into Nautilus, the default file browser in Gnome, Gloobus’ preview tool can open just about anything. Be it a PDF, an AVI, a Word Document or an MP3, Gloobus Preview can open it quickly and easily.

Not intending to be a universal editor, Gloobus only shows you the contents of a file; you cannot edit files with it. A button built into the interface allows you to quickly open a given file with the default program for the job.

I managed to install Gloobus Preview on Ubuntu, but it should in theory work on any distro. Installing Nautilus Elementary helps with the experience, but isn’t necessary.

See Your Files Quickly

Gloobus Preview can quickly open just about everything. Using it is simple: just open your file browser and hit “Space” when you want to preview a file. This will quickly open a slick window with a quick preview:

As you can see, this is perfect for pictures: you’re given a quick look at the photo that’s larger than Nautilus’ tiny thumbnail. But the program doesn’t only support photos. This gives you a fast way to browse your photos.

But it doesn’t stop there. Word documents and PDFs are also supported, really useful if (for example) you’re looking for a certain document but can’t remember it’s name.

Not enough? Your media can also be quickly previewed, including videos and music. Click space to quickly identify your videos:

Music works just as well, which could come in handy when you’re looking for a specific tune. I could go on, but you get the general idea: all of your files, quickly previewed.

The biggest shortcoming here, for me, is the inability to preview docx and xlsx files – Microsoft’s new(ish) file formats for Word and Excel. I assume this will come soon enough, though.

Installing Gloobus Preview

Ready to check it out? Time to install Gloobus Preview, then. Sadly this is not yet a straight-forward process, but don’t panic: we’ll get through it together.

If you’re a Ubuntu user, open your Terminal. I know, you hate the Terminal, but it’s the easiest way. You’re going to want to run this command:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gloobus-dev/gloobus-preview

This will automatically install and autheticate the Gloobus PPA. Now all you need to do is update your package manager and install the “gloobus-preview” package. Do this with the GUI tools, if you like, or with the following two commands:

sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install gloobus-preview

Just like that you’re done, but if you want to preview word Documents you’ll also want to ensure you have the “unoconv” package installed. Check the software center for it.

A note: I wasn’t able to get this working on 10.10 until I installed Nautilus Elementary, so be sure to give that a try if you’re having trouble. It’s pretty great to have on your system anyway.

Non-Ubuntu users: sorry. There’s not a lot of directions for getting Gloobus Preview installed out there, but Gloobus Preview’s download page is probably the best place to start looking. You’ll find the source code there, as well as a package for Arch Linux.

Supported File Types

• Images: jpeg, png, icns, bmp, svg, gif, psd, xcf
• Documents: pdf, cbr, cbz, doc, xls, odf, ods, odp, ppt
• Source: c++ , c#, java, javascript, php, xml, log, sh, python
• Audio: mp3, ogg, midi, 3gp, wav
• Video: mpg, avi, ogg, 3gp, mkv, flv
• Other: folders, ttf, srt, plain-text

Conclusion

This program’s already saved me a lot of time, and I’ve only been using it for a week. What about you: do you think it’s useful? Or is it just more bloat? Let me know, and also let me know if you know of any better tools for doing this!

Interclue is a fun addon for FireFox. Actually it gives so much info on the preview that sometimes it seems too much (luckily, plenty of its behavior can be controlled via the tool options).

How Interclue Works: The Basics

After you have it installed, hover over any link and notice the linked domain favicon pops up nearby. Just hover over the icon and you will be able to preview URL page contents before clicking:

Control this feature from the tool options:

Navigate to: Tools -> Interclue options -> Linkclue activation

You can set the time delay before a Linkclue icon appears, when the icon disappears (if you use it) and if it should fade away. You can also specify if you want the icon to appear for internal links or external only.

In the same dialog, you can also customize the size of the preview window.

What’s in a Preview?

The preview pop-up includes:

• The linked page text;
• The linked page thumbnail (upper-right corner);
• “Meta clues” that provide further info on the linked page.

The latter is actually pretty useful feature (but probably that’s what I call “too much”). The meta clues can include:

• Delicious saves and tags;
• The number of downloadable files on the target page;
• Page date, etc

Meta clues can be disabled using the [x] next to the feature, or in the Interclue options panel.

Control this feature from the tool options:

Navigate to: Tools -> Interclue options -> and from there:

• -> Page summaries: to adjust the font of the page text in the preview pop-up;
• -> Meta clues: to set the additional information you want to be collected in the preview window;

Different Types of Links

Besides favicons (displayed for “normal” links), other types of icons may appear upon mouse-over in some cases – these icons can signal:

1. HTML anchors (or “named” anchors):

This will usually work for “Comments”, “Read more”, links from the blog home page, for example. The preview window will show exactly the part of the page where the link anchors to:

2. Redirected links

See the redirect icon and learn the ultimate link target upon hover:

3. Image links:

The preview window lets you see a larger version of the linked image and some additional information:

4. Other type of links:

• Malware or phishing sites;
• Dead / broken links;
• Non-HTML links (.pdf, .doc, .swf);
• Shortened URLs;
• etc

Control this feature from the tool options:

Navigate to: Tools -> Interclue options -> Hover Cues -> “Adjust Hoverclue settings for different types of links…”

Preview Window Additional Actions

The preview pop-up speeds up quite a few browsing tasks. By default, you are able to instantly:

• Preview the next/previous similar link in the same window (for example, for MakeUseOf home page, you can load the preview of each post one by one in the same dialog);
• Bookmark the link;
• Open the page in a new background tab;
• Email the preview window content;
• Copy the preview window content;
• Access your tools options.

Control this feature from the tools options:

Navigate to: Tools -> Interclue options -> Buttons

From there, you are able to see the full list of buttons, learn how to interpret them and enable/disable any of them:

I was very impressed by the variety of features and options that Interclue offers. What about you?

We have done the leg work for you — reading all of the Windows 7 reviews, testing the system and bringing you the skinny on Windows 7. We have chosen 3 awesome reviews to share with you. They have been taken from Lifehacker, Engadget and ArsTechnica. Let’s take a look at what they have to offer.

First up is the Lifehacker piece titled Complete Guide to Windows 7. It was written by one of my favorite bloggers Kevin Purdy. When you arrive at the page you will see a full featured Windows 7 review with a lot of background from the dudes and dudettes that have been using the operating system since it was leaked way back.

They discuss everything from Installation and setup to common issues, tricks, tips and links to showdowns like Snow Leopard vs Windows 7 and The top features in Windows 7. They go on to show us how to burn ISOs without any 3rd party tools and the magic being Internet Explorer 8′s new feature (only on Windows 7) that can clone a unresponsive tab ““ which is utterly awesome!

Our next Windows 7 review is from Engadget and can be found here. At Engadget, they get a little more nitty gritty and look at boot times (that are improved), visual enhancements and other points someone upgrading from XP would be very interested in.

Reading the Engadget review showed me Aero Peak which allows you to preview open windows without clicking on them. This is a huge help to anyone who juggles lots of windows on a daily basis like me. I also saw Aero Shake and Snap for the first time. Aero Shake allows you to grab and violently shake a window to minimize all other windows freeing you up from other tasks. And Aero Snap allows windows to snap together seamlessly as many of us wished for many many years ago.

They go on to give other links to full installation guides and a lot of information about Windows 7 any which way you look at it.

Last but certainly not least is ArsTechnica’s review of Windows 7.  I always love Ars’ reviews and this time they did not disappoint either.

They have a massive 15 page review (separated by links for each page”¦) that culminates with this tidbit that blew my socks off:

Overall, it’s pretty clear that Windows 7 is “Vista R2.” Hell, the branding of the server counterpart is a dead giveaway here. Windows Server 2008 RTM was exactly Vista SP1; Windows Server 2008 R2 is exactly Windows 7. Why does one retain its branding but not the other? Because the Windows Server 2008 branding is popular and successful (the OS was, quite rightly, very well-received) in a way that the Vista branding is not. If Vista had gotten the reception it actually deserved, and become a brand worth keeping, it seems highly likely that the name would have been retained. And Microsoft knows it, which is why internally, Windows 7 is only version 6.1. Sure, the company has made specious claims that this is to avoid breaking applications with bad version checks, but the logic doesn’t really hold; many of those applications are just as broken by “6″ as they would be by “7,” and if that were such a concern then the minor version wouldn’t change either.

But at the end of the day, that doesn’t really matter. Windows 7 is, overall, a fantastic OS. It builds on a solid platform, and just makes it even better.

ARS touches on important points like branding and comparing features like UAC to Seven’s younger sibling Vista. They really do touch on everything and just like the others make for a great read.

So what do you think of Windows 7? Share your opinions with us in the comments!