From the mail bag: Where can I get this book?

Thursday, February 07, 2008 at 6:03 PM

Posted by Dan Abbe, Book Search Support Team

It’s time for another post “From the mail bag,” where we publish an email from one of our users and tackle it head-on. Here's a message from Bob in Arlington, Texas, who’s new to Google Book Search:

“I have found a book that I am interested in. It has been scanned. I have added it to My Library, but I cannot find out how to access or buy it. How can I do that?”

So you've discovered a great book, and after getting to know it a little bit, you've added it to your personal online collection. You feel ready to take the next step, but how do you seal the deal?

Take a look at the right hand column of the Google Book Search interface, where you'll see the ‘Buy this book’ heading:



We’ve partnered with a whole lot of publishers (over 10,000) to bring you previews of their books on Google Book Search. If the book you’ve found was submitted by one of these publishers, you'll often find that the first link takes you directly to their website. In this case, you could follow the first link to purchase the book directly from its publisher, Routledge.

You'll also find links that take you to various online bookstores. You’ll see different links depending on where you're located, since we try to make sure you get geographically relevant sites.

Finally, you’ll see a link to ‘Find this book in a library.’ We work with major union catalogs like WorldCat so we can show you which libraries closest to you have your book available.

That's not all, though -- when a book is no longer under copyright where you live, we work to ensure that you have the option to download a PDF copy, which you can print and read at your own pace.

And with that, we've finished our tour of ways you can get a print copy of an intriguing book. We hope it helps those of you who've chanced to run into a book a few times to "make the connection"...