Point your camera at a book’s barcode and instantly see its title, author, and publisher.
Every other tool on this site runs entirely as JavaScript in your browser and never contacts a server at all. This one is a deliberate exception, by necessity: the barcode you scan or type is sent to this site’s server, which passes it to Open Library and, if needed, Google Books — two free book databases queried on your behalf — unavoidable, since Open Library requires a request header browsers can’t set themselves — nothing about the lookup is logged. Nothing about the request is logged, stored, written to a cookie, or shared with any third party — it's handled and discarded the moment the response is sent back to you.
This describes only what this specific tool does with what you type into it. It doesn't cover the rest of this site — see the Privacy Policy for how analytics and advertising cookies are handled elsewhere.
Point your camera at a barcode, or type the number in by hand, to look up what it identifies — starting with books, since a book's barcode is a real, standard EAN-13 barcode (the "Bookland" format, printed on essentially every book sold since 2007) that directly encodes its ISBN. Scanning it and looking that ISBN up gives you the title, author, publisher, publish date, and cover image.
The camera scanning itself isn't book-specific — it recognizes any standard barcode, the same technology used at a retail checkout. What's currently book-specific is only the lookup step: once a barcode is read, this tool currently only knows how to look up what it means for books. The lookup type selector is built to grow — a future type (like general retail products) would reuse the exact same scanner, just with a different lookup behind it.
The barcode you scan or type is sent to this site's own server, which looks it up against two free book databases in turn — Open Library (run by the Internet Archive) first, and Google Books as a fallback if Open Library doesn't have a record. This matters in practice: Open Library's catalog is strong for mainstream and older books but has real, noticeable gaps for regional and educational publishers — Indian textbook and guide-book publishers like NCERT or Oswal, for instance — that Google Books' broader catalog often covers instead. The result shows which of the two sources actually found it.
This routes through a server at all as a deliberate, necessary exception to how most tools on this site work — Open Library's API asks callers to identify themselves with a descriptive request header that a browser is not allowed to set on its own, so the lookup has to happen through a server rather than directly from your browser. Nothing about the request is logged or stored beyond what's needed to return the result to you.
It checks two sources before giving up: Open Library first, then Google Books as a fallback. Open Library alone has real gaps for regional and educational publishers (Indian textbook publishers like NCERT or Oswal, for example), which Google Books’ broader catalog often fills in — between the two, coverage is noticeably better than either alone, though still not exhaustive for very obscure or very new titles.
Open Library’s API asks every caller to identify itself with a descriptive request header, which browser JavaScript isn’t allowed to set on an outgoing request for security reasons. Routing the request through this site’s own server is the only way to do that properly — and it also lets one lookup try both Open Library and Google Books in turn without exposing two separate calls to your browser.
Not yet — the lookup type selector currently only supports books. The camera scanner itself already reads any standard barcode; a future update could add a product lookup using the same scanned code without changing how scanning works.
The scanning itself runs entirely on your device and doesn’t need a connection — only the lookup step afterward, once a barcode has been read, needs to reach the server.
Type the number in manually instead, using the field below the scanner — it works exactly the same way, useful if the barcode is damaged, glossy, or your device’s camera is having trouble focusing.