Catalog notes

A shelf, not a library.

Where to Read is a static catalog of public-domain books. It tells you where a text can be read. It does not host the books.

What you will not find here

No ebook files, and no copy of a copyrighted book. Each title links out to its Open Library work and, when there is a landing page, to Project Gutenberg. Those links leave this site.

Where the facts come from

The title, the author, and any year printed on a card come from the catalog record. A year is shown only when that record already has one, and never past 1928. A featured book keeps a handwritten note. Any other note is a sentence rewritten from a public description of that book. Where no such description was found, the card has no note: that book page is noindex on its own, and the title is left off the author and subject shelves. Notes do not carry catalog ids.

Covers and indexing

Cover images, when a record has one, are loaded from covers.openlibrary.org. They are not stored here. A book page with no note sends its own noindex robots tag. An author page that lists no book with a note does the same. Home, about, the subject pages, book pages that have a note, and author pages that list one stay open to indexing. Each canonical URL is the absolute address of that page on https://booksthere.com/, with the trailing slash. The sitemap lists those indexable addresses and leaves the empty-note book pages and the empty author pages out.