How to find books

Find what you need on UK education collection. Our diverse, growing collection has thousands of titles (availability varies by country). 

How to find books on RNIB Bookshare 

This video explains how you can quickly and easily find the books and resources you need on RNIB Bookshare. We show you how to use the websites search, advanced search and browse functions in the most effective way and introduce you to our Special Collections, which are great for teacher resource packs and project work.

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 hypens - just a string of 10 or 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 UK education collection 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 catalog 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 UK education collection.