11 Answers2025-08-13
I use a somewhat old-school method here at The Rap Sheet. To begin with, I keep a personal spreadsheet of my own library. When I’m not sure whether I have a certain book or not, I first check the ISBN on that spreadsheet. If that fails, I immediately search for the book on AbeBooks, because – as a marketplace for used and rare books – the sellers here are highly accurate with regard to the ISBN of the copy they are selling.
Looking through a few listings confirms the ISBN number for me. The listing for a used book also includes a photo of the cover. In this case, it is easy enough to tell that one listing is for a hardcover edition and the other for a paperback edition. I prefer browsing a used bookstore this way as opposed to a purely digital search for an ISBN.
3 Answers2025-07-21
I heavily use ISBN searches but books that are out of print require a lot of thinking. Apart from 'UsedBookCentral' and 'Biblio' that allow you to search by ISBN on used books websites, on the forums like Reddit’s r/BookCollecting there are many databases of used books as well as contacts of private sellers.
Physical auctions can be a goldmine. Most major auction houses, including Heritage Auctions, list the ISBN number for books in their printed catalogs. I was surprised at the number of rare titles that appeared in their sales. In fact, I was able to pick up a first edition of the paperback edition of Dune for a relatively low price.
For non-English language books, ISBN searches are not as reliable. In the past, BookDepository (before it closed) and the global site for Kinokuniya were fantastic resources. Nowadays, I often find what I’m looking for on eBay (internationally) or through rare book vendors listed on Alibaba. It’s hard work, but an absolute thrill to hold a long out of print book in your hands after all that searching.
4 Answers2026-07-13
Scan the book using the Google Books app. By taking a photo of the barcode on the back of the book using your phone, you should be able to search for the exact edition. It’s often quicker than manually entering the book. If the Google Books app fails to find the book, I use BookFinder dot com to search for books by their ISBN. BookFinder aggregate second-hand stock from hundreds of retailers worldwide, providing a good indication of what you actually have.
13 Answers2025-08-13
Short answer: Yes. This is especially true when you're selling directly to your audience (like at events, from your own website, from your own eBay/Esty store, etc.). You can buy an ISBN and put your book up for sale on gumroad.com and elsewhere, without ever using it for distribution. We actually recommend avoiding the use of ISBNs when you're self-publishing until you know whether or not you're going to need them for wider distribution. They're not an immediate barrier to entry for most indie authors and small press publishers. But, in order to get your books into bigger retail stores and into libraries, you're going to need an ISBN. It's the universal product code for books, and it's primarily used for distribution to these sorts of places (BN, expanded Amazon distribution, library catalogs, etc.).
8 Answers2025-08-11
For people who like to buy used books, ISBNs are great. They can search for a specific out of print edition of a book. Without the ISBN, you are left to the seller’s description of a used book. Sometimes the description is even accurate enough for the buyer to purchase the book based on the description. But more often than not, the description is not accurate enough for the buyer’s needs. With an ISBN number, you can find the exact book you are looking for, such as the 1978 Ballantine paperback edition with the cover art that you like.
2 Answers2025-05-21
A search for rare books online can take a lot of time, especially if you know where to look. So I thought it would be a good idea to list some of the search spots I use regularly. There’s Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, which offer lots of free rare books. The Open Library allows you to borrow rare books online in the form of e-books. Digitized versions of rare books from university libraries like the Harvard University Library Digital Collections can also be accessed online for free. In addition, there are many online forums like the community of the rare books forum on Reddit (r/rarebooks), where one can find tips and links to search spots.
5 Answers2025-07-16
Joining specific Discord servers for genres or authors of interest can also be really useful. I know of servers for classic sci-fi, for horror, and for academic philosophy. People share links and discuss different editions of a book in dedicated channels. As people are actively searching for the same thing, it can become a collaborative hunt in real time. Someone posts that they are searching for the original magazine version of a particular story and within minutes there are links to scans provided by several members. Not only does joining these communities make the hunt less lonely, but also you can find out about books of interest that you would have otherwise never known about from other people with immense knowledge on the subject.
3 Answers2025-07-13
You don’t need a library card to search for books and find them in the library. If you want to find a book online, libraries’ online catalogs are usually available to anyone, on the web. Then you can go to the library and find the book using its call number.
Furthermore, guest access to the library’s computers is offered to search the library’s online catalog. Help is always at hand from the librarians to find what you are looking for, whether or not you have a library card. In many cases, you can even read your book in the library’s reading areas without even checking it out with your library card.
Some library apps (like Libby or OverDrive) can be used by people without a library card to search for books, but a library card is typically required to place holds or check out e-books for permanent download. It’s worth checking your local library to see if they have an app and if it can be used without logging in with a library card number first.
9 Answers2025-06-10
The local library where I work has a little trick for this, using the “editions” tab on WorldCat. The trick is to search for a title, and get back a list of all known editions of that work, each with its own OCLC number, published, and date. Then you can click through to the full bibliographic record for each edition. It’s a bit of a clunky interface, but it’s the only place to get a view even remotely approaching this, and for really obscure stuff, searching the abstracts of academic dissertation can yield results: some PhD student has probably done the bibliographic work for a critical edition as part of their research.
5 Answers2025-08-19
For free e-books that are a mix of old and new, I recommend checking out the public domain books that Standard Ebooks has beautifully formatted for the modern reader. For free manga, MangaDex and ComiCake have plenty of fan-translated works available (just use an ad blocker and be aware that the legality of these is somewhat in question). For free audiobooks, the volunteer recordings at Librivox are great for listening to while doing other things. And many university websites offer free texts by professors and students, including literature and philosophy books at MIT OpenCourseWare. You can download these and then transfer them to your tablet using a cable or by emailing them to yourself.