Tag Archives: Books

viaLibri – search for rare books

viaLibri searches for old and rare books on eighteen different web sites that aggregate the inventory of hundreds of antiquarian booksellers world-wide. You can search by a number of criteria including author, title, imprint, publication years (before/after), price, first edition and keyword. As the interfaces and search options of the individual sites are different you may get no results at all if your search is too narrow, so it pays to start off with a relatively broad search. You can always edit your search later and add extra criteria.

You can sort the results by year of publication, price, author, title or bookseller and then click on the individual links to view further details of the book or buy it from the bookseller.

viaLibri search results

There is also a Quick Query Library Search that searches 72 online library catalogues including Worldcat, Copac, National Union Catalogues and National Libraries. You can use viaLibri’s Quick Query, which only searches on author, title or keywords, but enables you to click and run your search in each catalogue in turn without re-typing your search. Alternatively you can click through to each of the catalogues advanced search screens, but you will have to re-enter your search terms.

A very nice site if you are trying to locate a rare book for purchase or if you just want to find a copy in a local library for research purposes.

BookMooch – book swap

BookMooch lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. You receive a tenth of a point for every book you make available on BookMooch, and one point each time you give a book away. In order to keep receiving books, you need to give away at least one book for every three you receive. You receive three points when you send a book out of your country, to help compensate you for the greater mailing cost, but it only costs the moocher two points to get the book. Sounds a little complicated but in practice the process is very straightforward. The only minor downside is that it taps into the Amazon database and if your book is not listed on Amazon – and Amazon does sometimes manage to mess up bibliographic data – you can’t add it to your BookMooch ‘inventory’.