Book buying ain't what it used to be. Walk into a modern chain bookstore and you'll be greeted primarily by the smells of cappuccino wafting from the obligatory café and the screams of tots echoing from the brightly lit children's section.

Of course, one need not set foot inside an actual bookstore, what with the likes of Amazon.com and the point-and-click versions of both Barnes & Noble and Borders. The smells and sounds will be limited to those found in your own home, but you'll be presented with a catalog of millions of books still in print.

While there are many in-print books of great interest to genealogists, I find that I am often looking for some family history or local history now sadly out of print. I know that copies of these rare animals still exist somewhere, because I sometimes stumble across them in one public library or another, although my meager budget of quarters (as well as my respect for copyright law for those volumes still under copyright protection) rarely lets me copy more than the most significant portions. In some cases, I've never even seen the books in question, but know of their existence only by finding them referred to by other genealogists or by searching the online catalog of the Library of Congress.

A few years ago, I would have been forced to comb the shelves of used bookstores and antique shops. For example, while I was on a trip to my hometown of Newberry, South Carolina, I took the opportunity to visit several downtown antique stores just across the main square from the town's recently refurbished, historic Opera House. The stores were occupying space that in my childhood had been five-and-dime stores, and their owners had preserved the old wooden floors and high ceilings. It would be a bit of an exaggeration to compare these stores to the dank, musty bookstores of Dickensian England, but the smells of older books, the near silence, and the quaint handwritten signs identifying the book categories did seem to put me closer to the Victorian Age than to the age of the modern book superstore.

In one of those stores, I stumbled upon a family history that I had always wanted to own, but until then had only been able to borrow from others. As a nod to the modern world, I quickly used a credit card to buy it.

I realize that before the Web people were able to locate old books without having to leave their homes. As they still do, sellers of used books sent out catalogs, and individuals offered their services by mail or telephone in locating wanted volumes. Now that we live in a world of e-commerce, many of those same booksellers have established Web sites on which to place their catalogs, and search services offer online forms to make it easy to identify which books you are hoping to find.

My favorite Web-based book searching service is Bibliofind. There's nothing complicated here: The home page contains the search form where I can locate a book by author or title, or by other features, such as whether or not the book is a first edition or whether or not the book is signed by the author. For my purposes, the author and title fields are nearly always enough to help me find what I'm looking for. And because Bibliofind lists more than ten million books offered by thousands of different book sellers, it's easy to comparison shop in order to find the best price.

One search tip worth remembering: Nobody's perfect, and it's not unusual to find that the book's author or title has been misspelled or a word has been omitted. I have found that it's a good idea to search for a book using different forms of the author's name, or by using different sets of words from the title. Bibliofind pulls its entries from those submitted by the various booksellers pretty much as is, so there can be a lack of consistency.

So, brew your own cup of coffee, sit in your favorite comfy chair, and use your mouse to find and purchase that rare tome you'd like to add to your personal library. When it comes to buying books, it's the best of times.

Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes the "Cybrarian" column (formerly known as "Infobahn"). He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.