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Last edited by AgentSapphire
February 15, 2024 | History

Reading Books on Open Library

Which books can I read? And how do I find them?

Open Library has millions of records for books that are not yet available in digital form; it also has nearly three million books that are available in digital form. There are a few ways to search Open Library

You can also browse Open Library by Subject or Author or look at Lists of books that other users have created.

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If this is a library, why can I only read some of the books?

Unfortunately, most books remain unavailable in electronic form. For those books, we have only a record. Open Library is a long-term project to provide a complete catalog of all books and, incrementally, as many of those books as possible in freely available electronic form.

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How do I read or download books on Open Library?

Start with a search for a book.

You can search for eBooks by checking the box that says "show only eBooks" when you search. This will show Classic books as well as Modern books. To read a Classic book you can choose your format by clicking on it.

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How do I learn more about how BookReader works?

We have online documentation for the BookReader available as well as a mailing list for BookReader development discussion.

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How can I add a bookmark in BookReader?

To bookmark page that you are on:

1. click the ••• icon 2. click "Bookmarks 3. click add Bookmark

We also have a short video clip demonstrating how to add a bookmark in BookReader.

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Can I read Classic books on my Kindle?

Yes but it can be tricky. You can get Amazon to email you Kindle documents to your phone by making sure your email address is registered with Amazon. You need to go to amazon.com -> Your Account -> Manage Your Content and Devices -> Settings -> Approved Personal Document Email List` (or click here when logged in) and make sure your email address is there. We're still troubleshooting this feature, please email us with specific questions or use cases. Top

We have a HOWTO page that outlines ways of doing advanced searches for books by author birth date, location or publication date ranges as well as all the other searches. Top

How do I find books written in my language?

Open Library has books in many languages. The best way to find books in your language is to do a search for the language and on the search results page, look at the categories in the right column of the results page and click on the language you are looking for. Here are a few examples

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I have found a book but it isn't in a readable format. Is something wrong?

No! This just means that we don't have that book in digitized form yet. You can perform your search again by checking the box that says "show only eBooks" to see if we have might have it anywhere in digitized form. If you don't find it on Open Library, you might want to try other collections of digitized books such as Hathi Trust or Google Books.

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History

February 15, 2024 Edited by AgentSapphire Remove mentions of icons and replace with current button information.
July 11, 2023 Edited by AgentSapphire add bookmarking tutorial
July 23, 2021 Edited by raybb all links https
February 22, 2016 Edited by Jessamyn West tightening up
January 15, 2011 Created by girl2k Edited without comment.