Books in Print

Description of publication

For 49 years, Books in Print (BIP) has served the library and book trade communities as the definitive bibliographic resource. A recent edition, covering over 230,354 new book titles, provides coverage of the full range of books currently published or distributed in the United States. This 49th edition of BIP contains 1,265,891 active titles published by 49,000 U.S. publishers. Bound in nine volumes, the set includes four volumes arranged by title and four by author. The ninth volume is devoted to publisher information and includes names and addresses of all publishers mentioned in the author and title volumes. (Amazon.com Inc. offers over 2.5 million book titles for sale over the Internet: www.amazon.com. We're not talking reference works here, but we just thought you'd like to know.)

BIP doesn't list books that are not published or exclusively distributed in the United States or books that are not available to the trade or general public for single or multiple copy purchase. BIP is designed to be easily searchable by both author and title.

Subject Guide to Books in Print, an annual companion volume to Books in Print, is produced from the BIP database of R. R. Bowker. This database is used to produce a complete, complementary line of bibliographic publications that gives booksellers, librarians, publishers, and all other book, on-line, and microfiche users access to the latest bibliographic and ordering information.

Although there are 1,271,903 entries in Subject Guide to Books in Print, users should be aware that certain classes of publications are not represented. These include subscription reference sets, book club editions, books available only to members of a particular organization, subscription-only titles, or those sold only to schools. Books must be available for single-copy purchase to be listed. Fiction, poetry, and drama by a single author are omitted. Collections by more than one author and criticism are included.

The bibliographic database was begun in 1948 primarily as a listing of titles included in Bowker's Publishers Trade List Annual (PTLA). The computerization of this database during the late 1960s using the Bibliographic Information Publication System (BIPS) made it possible for Bowker to expand the amount of information included in the bibliographic entries and to increase the number of essential tools of the trade it produced.

During the early 1970s the database was expanded to include information from additional publishers whose titles were not included in PTLA. Since then, the database has been compiled from information received on an ongoing basis directly from publishers. Before each publication from the database, publishers review and correct their entries, providing current price, availability, and ordering information, and update their list with recently published and forthcoming titles.

Software Encyclopedia is another Bowker product (see Chapter 21). It is an annual two-volume publication listing software and CD-ROM products for business, personal, and professional use. Bowker also publishes Ulrich's International Periodicals Directory (see Chapter 15).

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Books in Print

Annual publication
0-8352 3785-0
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