Find Books

The Bookshare® library contains tens of thousands of accessible books and continues to grow rapidly. Anyone can search for books in the library. However, only Members can download copyrighted books. All freely distributable titles (e.g. public domain or Creative Commons licensed) can be downloaded by anyone, with or without a membership. Learn more about membership or log in (at the top of any page).

There are multiple ways to use the Bookshare library:

 

Search for Books

Bookshare’s powerful full text search feature allows you to find exactly what you need:

  • Search all text, including the title, author and contents of every book in the library, quickly and efficiently. A search for “William Shakespeare,” for instance, will return all books with William Shakespeare in the title or in the text of the book, as well as Shakespeare’s works.
  • Use full text search to assist with research.
  • Find what you are looking for, even if you don’t know the exact word.

Full text search works whether you are using Quick Search, Standard Search and Advanced Search. Please review the “Tips for Searching” below to optimize your searches.

Quick Search

For a streamlined search page that works well with screen readers, log in to Bookshare and click Quick Search in the blue bar at the top of the page. This page has several advantages:

  • There is no top navigation or header to skip over to reach the content.
  • Search results are displayed in a simple Google-like format that offers quick access to download links and book information.
  • You can bookmark this page and come back to it whenever you want to find a book quickly.

Standard Search

For standard search, just type a word or phrase in the search field at the top of any page. All content is searched. The results display a list of books containing that term in the title, author’s name or content of the book.

Advanced Search

If you want more choices, select Advanced Search. In addition to searching for general terms, you can narrow your results by searching for any of the items below. The results contain only the books that match ALL of the criteria. For example: entering “Wuthering” in the Title field and “Bronte” in the Author field will return “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte.

  • Title
  • Author
  • ISBN
  • Language: English, Spanish
    (There are books in other languages, but they are not searchable by language at this time—Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese.)
  • Category: biographies, nonfiction, poetry, textbooks, etc.
  • Book type: copyrighted books, freely distributable books, etc.

  • Book Quality: “Publisher Quality” or “Excellent”

    Tip: The majority of Bookshare books are of excellent quality or above. There are some additional books that are of good quality. To include these books, select “Good or above” in Book Quality field.

Search Results

Bookshare’s powerful search engine provides improved search results:

  • Rather than an exact match, Bookshare now finds titles and authors that “sound like” the word you entered. For example, a search for Faerie Tales will return both Fairy Tales and Faerie Tales.
  • Bookshare will find all words sharing the same stem. For example, “bottling” will find “bottles”, “bottle”, and “bottled”.

The search results page is sorted by relevance and lists the author, title and a synopsis of the books that match your criteria. You can also narrow your search with the “Relevant Authors” field, which displays the authors who appear most often in the results.

Each title has a link for downloading the book. Learn more about downloading. If you are logged in as a Member, these links appear for all books. If you are not logged in, only freely distributable titles (e.g. public domain or Creative Commons licensed) have a download link. Log in (at the top of this page) or learn more about membership.

With Standard Search and Advanced Search, you can display the books as a table and sort by title, author, publisher copyright date or grade level. If you want to return to the default sort (relevance), click “Return to original sort order.”

Tips for Searching

  • Enter multiple search terms to find all books that contain ANY of those terms. For example:
    horse tiger
    returns all books containing either “horse” or “tiger” or both.
  • Use quotation marks to search for a phrase. For example:
    “French cooking”
    returns all books containing the phrase “French cooking” in the title, author or text
  • Use a minus (-) to search for all books that DO NOT contain a certain word. For example:
    mystery -Agatha -Christie
    returns all books containing “mystery” but not “Agatha” and “Christie.”
  • Use the wildcard character (*) to broaden your search results. For example:
    • “king” returns “king”, not “peking” or “kingsley”
    • “*king” returns “peking”
    • “king*” returns “kingsley”
    • “*king*” returns both “peking” and “kingsley”
  • Common articles (“a”, “an”, “of”, “the”, “be”, “is”) are not searched as they return too many results.
  • Some search results may include listings for books (labeled as “Remote Books”), that are not part of Bookshare’s online library but instead are available from other providers. The book information page includes a link for contacting the book provider.

 

Browse Collections

If you just want to look through the Bookshare library, you can browse by:

Bookshare is continually adding new Special Collections, so check back often. Here are a few of the more popular collections:

 

Request a Book

If you don’t find what you are looking for in the Bookshare library, you can always request a book:

  • For K-12 textbooks: Search the Bookshare library first. If you don’t find the textbook, you can download the Quick Guide to Requesting a NIMAC Textbook through Bookshare. Bookshare is happy to assist you in obtaining textbooks through the National Instructional Materials Accessibility Center (NIMAC).

    NIMAC-sourced titles are only available to U.S. K-12 public schools for students who are Chafee-qualified and have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP).
  • For other K-12 school books (other than textbooks): Send a request to Bookshare’s School Book Team. Please be sure to include the following information if you can:
    • Book Title
    • Author
    • ISBN number (this will speed things up a lot)
    • The reason you need the book
    • The grade you are currently teaching or attending in school or college.
    While Bookshare tries to process all student and teacher book requests, please understand that in some circumstances the requested material may not be available or suitable for Bookshare’s scanning processes. The Bookshare team will reply to your email within three business days, so you know the status of your request.
  • For general reading books: Visit the Wish List,. The fastest way to add these books to the Bookshare library is to volunteer and scan them in. Learn more about volunteering.

 Tip: Teachers and educators, please send in your reading list. Bookshare will scan any state or school district recommended reading lists.