Find A Book You Want With Online Bookstores
With the interesting stuff slowly draining out of the real world, we are constantly turning to the online world and in particular, online bookstores, for information and edification. If you are wanting to get better at your hobby or profession, as we all do, we still turn to books for help.
How do we find a book that fits our needs? Try an online bookstore like Amazon. Think of the keywords you are looking for, type some into the search box and watch a string of book titles appear.
The titles alone don’t tell us whether the content is any good and the authors’ names probably aren’t much help either. So do we labor through the reviews and synopses to get some idea of whether the books are useful or is there a magic formula to help us get rid of the dross and go find the gold glittering in the muddy search results.
So let’s go back to reading the reviews posted by people who have read the books. There are also online forums where people post their opinions and discuss their reactions to books. If you can find a decent number of reviews giving an opinion one way or another you can get some idea whether the book is worth your while.
Suppose you don’t have a clue about the books that have been written on the subject you are interested in. To begin the search for relevant books type in the subject you are wanting to know about. If you want to repair the plastic trim on the side of your car type in the make and model of your car as well as something like “repair plastic trim”.
If you find a book that awakens your interest, find a biography of the author amongst the promotional material on the book. Or type the author’s name into a search engine and see if his name is mentioned in forums or if other authors have been discussing him in their writings.
Google Book Search is a totally different way of finding a book. It’s a search engine with nothing but books so when you type your keywords in, you get books from the whole universe, not just form one online bookstore. Some of the books have extensive previews, some even give you the whole book!
There is also a web site called BookFinder that was founded by a bunch of book enthusiasts and searches for rare and out-of-print books amongst over one-hundred-and-fifty million titles. The books are new or used and you can also search for a textbook you have been having trouble finding.