Google Adds New Books Schema Markup With Buy E-Book Links

Dec 7, 2016 - 7:56 am 4 by

Google Authorship

Google has added a new schema markup type for books in their developer center. Aaron Bradley posted about it on Google+ explaining that this was just added on December 3, 2016.

It is currently a closed beta, but you can apply to be part of it by filling out this form.

These "book actions" make "Google Search an entry point for discovering books and authors, enabling Search users to quickly buy the books that they find directly from Search results," Google said.

Here is what the card looks like, including the buy e-book feature:

Google E Books

Aaron Bradly added:

It's worth noting that, not for the first time, Google is providing publishers with schema.org URLs that don't actually exist - here as values for the required EntryPoint Google-required property actionPlatform. All of these "schema.org" URLs Google glibly provided as actionPlatform targets will return a 404 if you actually attempt to fetch them (and no, you won't find them in pending.schema.org either):

* http://schema.org/DesktopWebPlatform
* http://schema.org/MobileWebPlatform
* http://schema.org/AndroidPlatform
* http://schema.org/IOSPlatform

It's perhaps understandable that when Google requires a new schema.org class or property that they just invent one rather than put it through the pipeline, but this happens frequently enough that I think we need to coin a phrase for these faux, Google-minted URLs. I propose "schoogle.org URL"

Purchasing books seems to be purely organic and no AdWords ads built into them, yet.

You can learn more about it in the developer center.

Forum discussion at Google+.

 

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