Everybody's Libraries

The catalog of free online books and serials at The Online Books Page continues to grow and improve every week. You can watch our new books listings, or subscribe to our RSS feed, to see what books we’ve newly cataloged on nearly every business day. There’s also a lot more development of the collection that you don’t see there. Right now, for instance, we’re adding information about newly available issues of many of the serials we already list, after 1930 copyrights expired at the start of January. (We’ve also updated information on what copyright renewals for them are still in effect, and updated our guides on determining whether books or serials are in the public domain.). And throughout the year, we fix links that break, import records from various other online book projects into our extended shelves, and improve our metadata to make it easier for readers to discover and get to things they want to read online.

That’s a lot for one editor (with a number of other job responsibilities) to take care of. Much of what makes it possible for me to do it is what I hear from readers all over the world. They tell me what books and serials they’re particularly interested in reading or consulting, and I use what I’ve been told to add works I might not have otherwise considered, and provide better information about them. I find out what subjects, authors, and serials a broad and diverse community of readers wants to read more of. I also find out about things I might have to fix in my catalog, as links go bad, better information surfaces about what I list, and sites go down or withdraw free access to work they once provided.

So I appreciate hearing from readers to keep the catalog fresh and useful. Long ago, though, it became clear that I could never keep up with all the suggestions people sent me by email. I can reasonably keep up with them, though, when readers use the forms I’ve set up for suggestions and corrections, and follow some basic etiquette when they do so. Here’s how to do that:

To suggest a new listing, use our suggestion form. If you haven’t recently read them, look at the instructions for making suggestions and the tips on filling out the form that are linked at the top of the form. That will tell you, among other things, what qualifies for listing on the site and what does not, and how to best ensure a useful and timely new listing.

You should include only one book (or serial) in each suggestion. If it’s a multi-volume work, or you know of multiple sites that have it, you can include extra URLs for them in the “Anything else we should know about this suggestion?” comment box near the bottom of the form.

If you want to hear from us that we’ve listed your book (or get any other response, whether it’s an answer to a question you asked in the comment box, or a note explaining why we declined to list something you suggested), put your email address (and if you like, your name) in the designated space in the form. There’s also a box you can check so these will automatically be filled in for you if you make another suggestion later (assuming your browser allows cookies from our site).

If you find a book in our extended shelves (which has data automatically imported from other sites), and would like it “promoted” to the “curated” collection (whose listings appear more prominently on our site, and whose catalog records we’ve checked and often improved), you can click on the “request that we add this book” link on its catalog page. That will take you to our suggestion form, with some of the fields already filled out based on the automatically imported record. Make any changes or additions you see fit, and then push the “Submit this suggestion” button at the bottom of the form. Please only do this for books you’re actually interested in reading or consulting. We know the automatically imported data on the extended shelves can be messy, but there are well over 3 million records in our extended shelves, and rather than spend endless time cleaning them all up manually, we’d rather spend our time listing and improving listings for books that we know our readers want to find.

For similar reasons, unless you have a particular interest in specific editions of a popular work, it generally isn’t a good use of time to exhaustively suggest all of the different editions of that work. (Those can run into the dozens or even hundreds, in some cases.) Instead, focus on the editions that you find most useful. (That will also help other readers find the most useful editions of that work, without having to sort through lots of chaff, not knowing which of many alternatives to choose.)

To have us fix something wrong in a listing, use the “report a bad link” link to take you to our bad links reporting form. If you select this from a book’s catalog page, some of the boxes in the form will be pre-filled to let us know which book you found the problem with. If you select it from the bottom of the page elsewhere on the site, you may need to fill in details on which listing you found the bad link on. In either case, it can be useful to fill in the “What happened when you tried the link?” box (even it’s just to say something like “I got a blank page”), so we can better troubleshoot the problem. You can also report other problems with the listing, such as bad metadata, if it’s in our curated collection. (Don’t bother doing that for the automated listings in our extended shelves, unless it’s a book you’re interested in yourself. In that case, though, it’s better to use the suggestion form, often reachable via a “suggest we add this book” link.)

You can also use the “what happened?” contact box to tell us if the site the book is on seems to have disappeared, reorganized, or been taken over by someone else. When we get a bad link report like that, we’ll often check out other listings that link to the same site, and deal with all of them as needed, without you needing to individually report every listing

If the forms aren’t working for you, you can email us instead at the address given on our site. The forms generally work for most people, but there are times when they might be unavailable. (The usual reason for that these days is that the site occasionally gets over-burdened by automated programs aggressively crawling our site and other cultural heritage sites.) If you need to email us because a form isn’t working, we’ll be able to pick out your email for attention if you include on your subject line the code word currently mentioned on our page of how to suggest works.)

Give us your email address if you’re suggesting more than a few works before we get around to listing them. We support the right to read anonymously (and the accompanying right to anonymously ask for what you want to read). We also understand that sometimes a reader might have good reason to suggest a moderately long list of works, such as from a thematic reading list or bibliography. But anonymity and bulk requests don’t go together well.

If you leave your email address when you submit a sizable list of suggestions, we can work out good ways to manage their inclusion, and let you know if issues come up with the list, or if you need to ease off or use a different approach. But if you submit a lot of works anonymously, there’s no way for us to give you feedback, or even to know if there’s a real person who actually cares about all the books requested, and not just mechanically going through a list without particular interest or thought about its contents. Which leads to our last request:

Do not use “AI”, “agents”, chatbots, or other automated systems to fill out our forms or otherwise communicate with us. Heavily promoted technology now makes it possible for computers to automatically generate lots of text that appears useful, and to automatically submit it into forms like the ones we use for The Online Books Page. But just because computer code can now quickly request dozens, or hundreds, of books that match patterns found when crawling the Internet, it doesn’t mean those books are of much interest to any human using my site at the moment. If you’re a person who wants to read a book that is or could be online, you should be to be able to request it from us, and get a quick and useful response. But it’s hard to do that when our attention gets pulled away from interested readers by the demands generated by automated systems, or by others impersonally claiming disproportionate shares of personal attention.

We do have ways of dealing with abusive bulk and automated requests, as we have for years with spam of all sorts. I recently added added a warning to our request form that “anonymous bulk submissions may be deferred or discarded partially or entirely, at the editor’s discretion”. We will be doing more of that in the future as long as such submissions are common, and we will take other steps that prove necessary to counter abuse and thoughtless demands on people’s time.

We value our readers, and want to hear from you, personally. I love that people all over the world use The Online Books to find reading that informs, enlightens, and pleases them. I’m thankful that so many of you want to share that reading with others, and help improve the collection we offer here. As I’ve said earlier, I intend to offer works and services “created with care by people, processed with care by code”. I’d love to hear about works that you particularly care about, so we can offer them to others. Whether you’re suggesting a book or serial we should add, prompting us to fix a problem, or simply appreciating what you’ve found here, I hope you’ll reach out to us, or to the people who create the books and maintain the sites that we link to. I hope what I’ve written here encourages you to do that, and help you to be heard in return.