Book

A search by ISBN number# will take you directly to your price comparison table. An ISBN (International Standard Book Number ) is a unique 10-digit machine-readable identification number for books. The ISBN system has been in use for the last 30 years and is now adopted by 159 countries and territories officially. For more information, please visit www.isbn.org/standards/home/isbn/us/isbnqa.asp. You can usually find an ISBN number on the back cover of a book, in an area that has some thing resembling a bar code. Searching by ISBN is usually the most accurate method to look for a book. If you don’t have the ISBN#, you can search by author first and last name (you do not have to put last name first) or title.

If the title is compound, try just the main title. For example: If you are looking for “History of New Paltz, New York and It's Families”, try just “History of New Paltz”.

If our new book search does not find the exact title you are looking for, it gives you the titles it thinks you might have been looking for! This can be confusing but it can also be helpful, if you had your information slightly wrong.

If we bring up your book, but none of the stores that we search has it in stock, there is a very good chance your book has recently gone out of print. There can be a period I call “the black hole” between the time a book goes out of print and the time it begins to appear on the used book market, when it can be very difficult to obtain. If you are patient, copies will begin to appear on the used book market, so be sure to try our used and out of print search.

We understand your annoyance when you think you’ve found your book, only to link to the store and find that it isn’t really available after all. We search book site databases, in real time. If a store or dealer leaves a book in their database when it is no longer available, we will bring it up. There is nothing we can do about this and I suggest that you go straight to the used book search, as your book may have recently gone out of print.

Personally, if I link to a new book store and they say they can get the book in 4 – 6 weeks, I tend to suspect that they are trying to get a copy from the publisher because the book is now out of print. I go to to search rather than waiting weeks only to be told they couldn’t get the book after all.


This is the fun search, for me, because you have so many options. The trick is to think like a computer and guess how a dealer will enter his book data. By the way, once a book is out of print, it cannot technically be called a new book, even if it has never been previously owned. If you find a “used” book described as “like new” it is often a “new” book gone out of print.

The most productive way to search for a used book is generally by author last name and title.

When searching by author and title both, enter author last name only, as some dealers will abbreviate author first name and some will enter the whole first name, some will include middle initial, etc. Entering the last name only will bring up all these variations.

Enter the main title, not the subtitle, as, once again, some dealers will include the subtitle in their listing and some will not and you want to bring up all the listings for your book.

When looking for a specific illustrator, try illustrator in the author field, as some dealers will put it there. If that doesn’t work, try illustrator in the keyword field.

If you are looking for a very common book, we will not necessarily show every copy of this book available from every used book site that we search. We give you up to 100 results from each of the sites that we search, having found that more results were unmanageable and counter-productive for most of our users. The very large sites rotate the results they give us to insure equal exposure for all of their dealers.

I tend to use our strict used book search, where spelling definitely counts.

I cannot resist saying it again: SPELLING COUNTS. As a friend of mine likes to say: “Computers have no sense of humor.” If you don’t bring up a match for your search, check first to make sure you have spelled author and title correctly. Try different possible spellings for words that are spelled differently in British and American English, like gray and grey, for example, or one that caught me up: encyclopedia and encyclopedia. Archeology and archaeology is another example.

There is no way to search by subject or content in our used book search. However, some dealers do include some content in their description of the condition of a book, so you can always try keywords for content or subject.

Publisher and publication date are keyword searches but read the description carefully as a dealer will sometimes include the original publication date in the description of a reprint.

Some of our users who are used to going to just one listing service to look for a book wonder why our First Edition and Signed parameters are not more exact. This has to do with the fact that we search many different listing services, each with a different way of entering searchable data. I have found that ordering my results by price in descending order and reading descriptions is the most helpful way to look for first and signed editions. And, the truth is, if I am putting out that much money for a signed and/or first, I want to be carefully reading the descriptions anyway.