Identifying If A Book Is Out of Print?

Suzy_M

Good Afternoon,

Would any of the book experts on this forum know of a web site where I can find out whether a book is still in print or not? I know book shops have access to the information but don't know if there is a database for public use.

Have a mountain of books to go through ready for listing in the autumn and would like to be able to indicate in the description whether it is out of print or not and possible rarity. (Have already dropped one clanger assuming a really old book - from memory c1850, would have some rarity value and found it is still in print!).

Thanks - and hope everyone has managed to keep warm and dry today.

eryn_kathleen

Depending on the genre, it can be very difficult to determine whether a book is truly out-of-print. Your c1850 book, for example, may be out of copyright and its possible that a low-cost publisher has reprinted it or is printing it on demand.

I work part-time for a very small publisher, and when we run out of a book we declare it out of print. But if a distributor has a significant amount of stock, they can declare it back in print and direct all enquiries to themselves. So even with recently-published books it's sometimes tough to tell if a book is really out of print.

Without knowing the actual titles of the books, I would suggest looking on Amazon marketplace, abebooks.co.uk, and alibris.com to find out what others are selling their books for. If other sellers are listing them as out-of-print, then I would think you could do that too.

You may also want to keep in mind that out of print doesn't always mean rare! And sometimes older and first editions of books that are still in print can be valuable.

funkyfunkymonkey

Hi

You could also use https://www.bookfinder.com as this site searches alot of the other databases for the different titles available and also does a price comparison.

FFM