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Book Searching

Last updated April 16, 2007.

New search engines are available for searching within the full text of digital versions of books. These are all eclectic collections. The "old" content is that from 1922 or earlier that is clearly out of copyright. The sources with "new" content include copyrighted books whose publishers have made deals with Amazon or Google to allow searching of the full (or partial depending on the agreement) text of the book but viewing is limited to only a portion of the whole work.

Service Content Comments
Amazon New and old Primarily limited view in-copyright books, many fully searchable
Google Books New and old Old, out of copyright works plus limited view in-copyright books
Internet Archive Text Archive Old, out of copyright books Full text not searchable. Try Live Search Books.
Live Search Books Old, out of copyright books Many books from Internet Archive but also has some unique ones.
Search Amazon, Google, and Live with Booksearch x 3 for a quick check of all three.

Web Search Technique:

Use this to try to find copies of books on Web sites. This technique may find copies of copyrighted material that is illegally being made available online. This works in both Google and Yahoo!. Use a title word or author name and then add the following:

  • intitle:"index of" "last modified size description" "parent directory"

Additional information