OpenLibrary.org

At its heart, Open Library is a catalog. The project began in November 2007 and has been inhaling catalog records from some of the biggest libraries in the world ever since. We have well over 20 million edition records online, provide access to 1.7 million scanned versions of books, and link to external sources like WorldCat and Amazon when we can. The secondary goal is to get you as close to the actual document you're looking for as we can, whether that is a scanned version courtesy of the Internet Archive, or a link to Powell's where you can purchase your own copy

Open Library's goal is to list every book -- whether in-print or out-of-print, available at a bookstore or a library, scanned or typed in as text. In other words, we provide access to all of Project Gutenberg's books but we have hundreds of thousands of others as well.

To create your Open Library digital library card account, click the “sign up” link at the top right corner of our home page, openlibrary.org. You will be prompted to enter the following information:

Full name: (i.e. Jane Doe - this will be visible on your user page)

Username (i.e. janeqdoe - must be all one word, alphanumeric only)

Password: (your choice)

Email address: ([email protected] - so we can email you if you lose your password, we will NEVER spam you)

You must also check the box agreeing to the Open Library Terms of Use before continuing.

Click “sign up” when you are finished. You will receive an email requesting verification of your account. Click the link in the email and you will now be able to sign in and start using Open Library. If you have trouble with the signup process please see our Troubleshooting section or send us an email and we can help.

Once you are registered, click the “log in” link at the top right corner of any page. Enter your username and password. Your name will now appear as a link in the top right corner. Click on the link to display a drop-down menu; here you can edit your Profile, manage your Loans, manage the Lists you create, edit your Settings, or log out.

You can help build the Library. All you need to do is hit the EDIT button and start filling in the gaps.

We seek all sorts of details, from what the book is about to information about the physical appearance of the book itself (size, format, number of pages, and things like that).

Another sort of information we're very interested in is anything that connects Open Library records to other book sites out there on the Web. The easiest way to do this is to collect what are called "identifiers". If you're a software developer, you might be interested to read a bit more about using Open Library data