How to find books
Finding books with RNIB Bookshare is easy. Follow our guidance below You can search for books without being logged in, but to be able to download books, or assign books for learners, you need to first log in to your account.
Search for specific books
The quickest way to find out if we have a book on the site is to type the ISBN into the Search box at the top of any page. Enter the ISBN without any spaces or hyphens - just a string of 13 digits.
- If the book is available it will appear in search results.
- If the book is not available you can request it and we will do our best to source an electronic file - this may be a publisher file, or one from another RNIB Bookshare member.
You can also search by title, author, publisher and synopsis. If you would like to search the entire text of the book, please use the Advanced search.
Advanced search
The Advanced Search page gives you a chance to specify words, names or phrases in particular fields such as title or synopsis, and limit by language or source.
Use quotation marks around words if you want to search a phrase (“pig in a poke” will get you results that have that particular set of words; without the quotes, you’ll get all books that have the words “pig” and “poke” included).
You can use wildcards to refine your search:
- using the "-" (minus) character narrows results. (A search of "snail -mail" will get you results about the garden pest, not about postal service.)
- using the "*" (asterisk) character broadens results. (A search of "swim*" will get you results on swimmers and swimming, as well as swim.)
- clicking on categories and grade level boxes may help narrow your results. however, not all records in our catalogue have this information, so you may miss some relevant titles if you use this to narrow your search.
And be warned! If you click on two categories, you’ll get all the titles within those categories, not titles that have both subjects!
Browse the collection
Use the Browse at the top of any page:
- search by author, subject category and education level.
Copyright
Read our copyright download guidance on using and storing books you download from RNIB Bookshare.
