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Once long, long ago I
asked my librarian friend Katy, sitting up there on the bench with me, how to
find a book. She mentioned that she used
ABE books to look for books at her bookstore job. For years I looked books up on ABE. Only later did I discover Alibris books. Now I can tell you that I’ve discovered many
more book search tools.
Two weekends ago, one
family donated a large collection of Nautical books to our ACS. We usually sell our books very cheaply. Very.
Two bucks for most hardbounds and one dollar for each paperback. The moment I looked into the first of these
boxes, I knew we couldn’t sell these quality volumes for one or two
dollars.
I have a tiny collection
of nautical books, and I’m a member of several Ocean Liner spots. I follow a few of these authors on Facebook
like Bruce Peter. Nowadays there is a
larger selection of search engines just for books. ABE is still fast and easy, but if you put
the author’s name into BookFinder.com, almost every book Peter has written
appears and lists the site that has it and by price.
As an example, searching
for just one Peter book on BookFinder, “Danish Ship
Design, 1936-1991: The Work of Kay Fisker and Kay Korbing,” my monitor fills with book search sites. If you click on the first listing, Amazon,
you find the volume in two shops, both in the UK, and both from $221.00 to
$225.00. Following prices down the right
side, they rise until at the bottom it is $411.66. Another title “QE2 Britain’s Greatest Liner,”
by Peter, shows us six pages of new and used books growing in price from $23.58
to $682.82.
Each
college or University system has its own unique library search system. Harvard Library suggests their cyber source,
Hollis. Stanford has Nerd Squirrel as a
guide. Harvard also suggests that Wikipedia’s
external links are useful. Google Books,
World Cat, and OAISTER are listed here also.
Looking up
these nautical books, I used the giant search engines ABE, Alibris, Biblio,
Amazon, and BookFinder. If I couldn’t find
the book anywhere, I resorted to Google.
I love a good mystery, and searching down a book is just like reading a
book by Louise Penny. The search starts
with a gentle question, and it sometimes ends in a long run. For me, the hunt is flat out fun offering an
exciting finish.