Locating Out of Print Books
Specialized technical books don't have a large audience, so the printings tend to be small and often short-lived. As a result, it can be difficult to find books more than a few years old.
Good technical books don't always become outdated, so I keep out of print books listed in my Bookstore. Most should be available in engineering libraries, and Borders.com will use Harvest to perform a search for you.
But what if you don't want to wait for a Harvest search, or you don't have access to an engineering library? Or, as often happens, the books is missing from the library?
Used Book Searches
I recently ran into this problem myself. I'm working with a high school science class on a raindrop project. All of the references we could find pointed to a book called From Raindrops to Volcanoes by Duncan Blanchard. This book was published in 1967 and has probably been out of print for over 20 years.
The local university library had a copy of the book, but it was checked out for the entire semester. We couldn't wait four months for the book, so I tried to find it on the Internet.
If you enter the phrase "used books" into a search engine, you'll get more links than you can deal with. Many of these are to local bookstores or cover specialty subjects. I stumbled across a good resource for technical books almost immediately.
Bookfinder.com
Bookfinder.com is my recommended starting point for locating used and out of print books. Bookfinder.com is a meta search engine: it searches other sites with comprehensive book listings for what you need.
In most cases, a quick search on author and title words will suffice. You can also specify new, used, first edition, signed copies, and currency type. Advanced options allow you to specify binding (hardcover or paperback), ISBN, keywords, and price range.
One of my Essential References, The Behavior of Structures Composed of Composite Materials by Vinson and Sierakowski has been out of print for a while now. I decided to test Bookfinder.com by searching for this book.
I entered "Vinson" for the author and "composite" for the title. After about a minute (I didn't time it), Bookfinder.com returned seven books by Jack Vinson with the word "composite" in the title. Fiver were new, two were used; the first on the list was the book I was looking for.
Clicking on the title brought me to a detailed page for that particular book. This page showed where I could purchase the book, including the names of the booksellers, a description of the book (including condition), and the price.
The book was available from two booksellers, Advanced Book Exchange and Bibliofind. Both booksellers are Web sites that list books from brick-and-mortar sellers. In this case, both were offering the book from the JF Ptak Science Books Warehouse.
Clicking on the book price (only $25 for a book still in its wrapper!) brought me to the Bibliofind page for the book. Bookfinder.com framed the page on top so you could easily return to your search, also providing a link to remove the frame.
The Bibliofind page gave a more detailed description of the book, gave contact information for the actual seller, and provided other information such as shipping costs and return policies. You could either order directly from the seller, or use the Bibliofind shopping cart to place your order.
The latter approach is what I used to buy the Duncan Blanchard book. It came from a small shop in Colorado that didn't provide online ordering. That book arrived in less than a week, and included a handwritten thank you note from the store owner.
Both Bibliofind and Advanced Book Exchange offer search and browse interfaces similar to Bookfinder.com. With Bookfinder.com, however, you have the advantage of searching those two sites plus many others.
About.com Resources
If you are looking for books on a specific subject, check related About.com sites. Many Guides have listings of used book resources on their topics. Two general resources are the Used Books listings from the Frugal Living and Online Shopping Guides.
Most Guides also have Bookstores, which you can find from the links on site home pages. Finally, you can search all About.com bookstores at once from the About.com Bookstore page.
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