The contemporary book environment is heterogeneous and hyper-abundant. It consists of books from large and small mainstream publishers and non-traditional publishers, in print and digital formats. Non-traditional publishers include authors who publish their own books  and publishers who specialize in non-royalty content, meaning content for which they do not have to pay royalties to authors. Most of this content consists of reuse of already existing material. Piracy falls into this category, but also reprints of content in the public domain and not covered by copyright. Private Label Content (PLC), inexpensive content that the buyer can modify and use depending on the license, can result in multiple copies of the same, usually short, content available in the Kindle Store and elsewhere.

The online marketplace, with representations of all the above and probably more, is a daunting place to search for books to buy. Focusing on Amazon, this report reviews some of the many ways to try to figure out exactly what you are getting before you pay for it.

Searching Amazon

Amazon is far more effective as a tool for locating books if you have an author and/or title, or other information such as an ISBN. If you don’t have a particular book in mind, you might try other resources to get a recommendation, such as friends, websites on the subject, and social networks. Looking in library catalogs online can be a good way to find mainstream books. Once you have a piece of information about the book, then you can use the Amazon basic search bar, specifying either the Kindle store, if you want an online book, or Books, if you want to see both print and digital. You may wish to use Amazon’s Advanced Search.

Amazon’s Advanced Search function gives you the opportunity to combine pieces of information about the book you wish to find in one search. Choose the “books” link at the left of the Amazon screen and the Advanced Search tab will appear on the top bar. The screen is reasonably self-explanatory.

Searching for a subject in Amazon opens up the heterogeneous and hyper-abundant marketplace in the area of your subject search. Your search will return perhaps hundreds or even more items, arrayed in screens of limited number. Keep in mind that what you get will be a mix of mainstream published books, books published by their authors, reprints, and perhaps some Private Label Content. When you find a title that appeals to you, you may wish to examine the record for that title to try to understand more about it. That’s where your sleuthing skills come in.

Sleuthing the Amazon Record

An Amazon record can represent different formats, mainstream or self-publishing and reuse of several different kinds. You can learn a lot about the book by developing your record-sleuthing skills. Here are some tips, many of them obvious, for learning about what you might want to buy.

• Read the substantive parts of the record, including the product description and the product details.
• A Google search on the author can be very informative, even if you pull up nothing. This obvious step is often all you will need to make your buy/not buy decision. If the author has written other things, you may want to check them out. 
• A Google search on the publisher can also be very informative, especially if it is a name you do not recognize. If you make a habit of looking up publishers, you will soon see patterns and know quite a bit about the sources from which books can come. 
• Look for any hints that the title could be a reprint, see below. 
• Find and evaluate the date in terms of what you are looking for. Some subjects wear well and a 10-year old book may be what you want. Look at the date in terms of other reprint clues. Many reprints will have very current dates, i.e. the date of the issue of the reprint. A lack of a date, especially in a $.99 Kindle title can be a signal to check out other offerings with identical or very similar titles.
• As another reprint clue, look for old-fashioned language or vocabulary. 
• Once you find a candidate title, search again on that title. Duplicates may reveal other versions with additional clues or clear evidence of a reprint. 
• If you are looking for a copy of a well-known older book, be clear about what is important to you. Do you care about a specific edition or text commentary? An author and title search will tell you if there are several reprints from different publishers, as there usually are. 
• Check sources of free content for known public domain reprints. The Gutenberg Project (http://www.gutenberg.org/) for example offers free downloads of over 36,000 titles you can read on your personal computer, mobile phone or dedicated e-reader.  
• Read the product description. Multiple books published from the same Private Label Content (PLC) will often have identical or very similar product descriptions. 
• For many books, Amazon has a very useful feature, Look Inside. Here you can see the preliminaries of the book and often determine if the text is reprinted from an older original. This is also a way to check to see if similar titles are the same PLC. Reading the few pages offered can give you a flavor of the style. 
• Check social reading sites such as LibraryThing or GoodReads for reviews, ratings and additional commentary. Search for specific titles and authors, or look up a book you think might be similar to what you are looking for and check the tag clouds (user-contributed categories) to find new books similarly grouped. 
• Reviews that are clear about what the reviewers liked and didn’t like are especially useful because you can compare what you like and don’t like and decide how useful the review is for you. 
• If you are buying a Kindle book, the sample chapter option often can help deciding whether the book is what you want.