Have you discovered the free ebooks and magazine available at Google Books yet? Although their My Library interface is functional, now there’s a graphical interface for Windows desktop that’s much more visual, and a lot more fun to use. GooReader is free application for searching, downloading and reading Google Books. A premium version is available for $20 that supports PDF creation.

Aardvark is a crowdsourcing platform for asking and answering questions, that was recently acquired by Google. When a question is received, Aardvark finds the perfect person to answer it by looking through your social connections, and others who have a knowledge of or an interest in the topic you’ve asked about. Although you can ask Aardvark anything, and most questions are answered within five minutes, popular topics include travel tips, product recommendations, local services, and restaurant suggestions.

Last week Google released a number of new Gmail features to the public, taking them out of Gmail Labs, which is a beta or testing platform. These include message color coding, search autocomplete, forgotten attachment detector, YouTube previews, and vacation away messages. At the same time, some test lab features were killed. To learn more, read CNN “Gmail Holds Graduations and Funerals“.

Google recently announced Google Buzz, a social media platform that integrates social networking into Gmail and other Google products. To check it, login into your Gmail Account and look for Buzz in the left-hand column. Is this going to impact Twitter or Facebook? Will you be jumping on the bandwagon? Let me know what you think by posting a comment at my blog.

Email newsletter subscriptions can pile up, and the start of a New Year is as good a time as any to finally unsubscribe from email you don’t want to receive. Here’s a Gmail tip for finding most subscriptions in your mailbox, so you can either go through one by one, or set filters to organize them by labels. Simply search for the word “unsubscribe.” This isn’t foolproof, but it will catch most of subscriptions in your inbox.

Amit Agarwal is a professional blogger, and despite what he knows about choosing secure
passwords, his Gmail account was hacked. Going through the recovery process to regain control of his Google accounts, he learned some interesting things. In this article he offers advice on what you should do now to make it easier to recover if you find yourself in a similar pickle. For example, write down the date you opened your Gmail account, and the names of any custom labels you created. To read all his tips, continue here.

Although it is still only available with an invite from an existing user, Google Voice recently opened up their free voice mail service for use with your existing phone number. With Google voice mail, you get voice mail messages with attached audio files delivered to your email inbox along with a transcription of most messages, so you can read what your voice mail says. Watch a video of these features at Google Voice .

On October 1, 100,000 lucky users got an invitation to preview Google’s new real-time communication platform: Google Wave. It combines email, instant messaging, chat, project management and social networking in a client that sits within the browser. To learn more, read Mashable’s guide or watch Google’s video .

Email experts advise against using your email inbox as storage and instead suggest frequently cleaning it out and storing old messages in archive folders instead. For Gmail users, here’s a filter that will move all messages older than a certain date to your archive. Click “Create a Filter” and in “Has the words” enter “before:2009/07/01″. Now choose “Next.” Check “Skip the Inbox” and the box that says “Also apply this to the conversations below.” Now click “Create Filter.” Of course, you can change the filter to use any date of your choice, in the format “before:YYYY/MM/DD”.

Although Google creates wonderful, free products that so many of us love and use, from a purely information management viewpoint, we should all be a bit more concerned with data portability. And Google agrees! The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose one goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of various Google products. Learn more at The Data Liberation Front.