Todays question from The Boston Bibliophile: What cataloging sources do you use most? Any particular reason? Any idiosyncratic choices, or foreign sources, or sources you like better than others? Are you able to find most things through LT’s almost 700 sources?

Like most people, I use Amazon most often, simply because it comes up first and I’m not going to go out of my way to make adding books more difficult. However, it is far from perfect. What I find so tremendously irritating about Amazon is the way it seems to ignore what I have actually typed in and try to make other suggestions. Case in point: I recently received a copy of First Daughter for review. When I type “first daughter” into the Add Books search box, Amazon comes up with:

1. What Your First Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good First-Grade Education (The Core Knowledge Series) by E.D. Jr Hirsch
2. First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (P.S.) by Loung Ung
3. The English American: A Novel by Alison Larkin
4. Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker by Stacy A. Cordery

and finally

5. First Daughter by Eric Van Lustbader

How on earth do you get “The English American” from “First Daughter”?? This is a pretty easy one – sometimes, I scroll for pages and pages to get the right book, especially if I have to search by the author’s name. It gets very frustrating!