How to Find a Quote in a Book, and the Page Number

Search inside the book on Google Books

Open the book on Google Books and use the box that searches inside that book, not the box that searches the whole catalogue. Type three or four words you are sure of. A whole sentence you might have misremembered will miss. A hit shows a snippet and, on many scans, a page number.

That number belongs to the edition Google photographed. If your paperback is a different year or a different publisher, treat it as a clue and check your own copy before you cite it. Many in-copyright books are snippet view, which shows up to three short snippets for each search, and some have no preview at all. If there is no search inside the book, Google does not have a text you can search. A blank result does not mean the line is missing from the novel.

Public-domain books: Gutenberg and the Internet Archive

When the book is out of copyright, two free copies are worth opening. Project Gutenberg has a plain text and, for most books, an HTML ebook. Open the HTML and use find in page. You get the wording, and usually the chapter. Do not expect the page number of a modern paperback. A few transcriptions keep an old pagination in brackets. Most do not. Use Gutenberg to confirm the sentence, then use a scan if you need a page.

The Internet Archive holds scanned books. Search for the title, open the item, and search the text of that scan. A hit opens the viewer on that page. If the printed page number is in the photograph, you can read it. It is the number for that edition, not for every edition. In-copyright scans are often borrow-only. Public-domain books are the ones you can usually read straight through. The checked lines on this site, such as the quotes index, were taken from named Gutenberg texts for that reason: the wording can be compared with a file anyone can open.

Find in page, in an ebook or a PDF

In a browser, find in page is Ctrl+F on Windows and Linux, and Command+F on a Mac. In Apple Books, Kindle, Kobo or Google Play Books, use the search field in the app. Start with a short run of words. If nothing comes back, drop a word you are less sure of and try again. A name plus one unusual verb is often enough.

Reflowable ebooks often count locations rather than pages. A page number shows up when the publisher supplied one, and it matches one print edition, which may not be the paperback on your desk. A PDF of a scanned book is simpler if the scan has a text layer: find jumps to the page, and the number printed on the scan is the number in that edition. A scan with no text layer is only pictures, and find will not see the words.

A library catalogue finds the copy

Use a catalogue when someone has handed you a page number. The number is useless until you know the edition. WorldCat shows which libraries hold which editions. Your local library, a university library or the British Library catalogue shows the edition it holds and the shelfmark or call number to ask for. Write down the year and the publisher before you walk over.

An ordinary catalogue does not search the sentences inside the book. It finds the copy. Once you have that copy, use the index, or one of the full-text searches above if a scan of the same edition exists. Matching the year matters more than matching the cover.

The paper book you marked yourself

None of those searches can see the pencil in your own copy. If the line is one you underlined, you need a library made from those pages. BookQuotes is that library, on iPhone and iPad. You photograph the marked page. On capture it can detect the page number. You still check the number against the print, because a number read from a photo is not guaranteed. An ISBN scan fills in the title and author from the barcode. If there is no barcode, you type them.

You name your own markings, so the underline or the star means what you decided it means. Collections and tags group lines after that: one book, or one question, kept together. Search looks through the passage, the margin note, the title and the author. It does not look through tag names or collection names. You can still filter the book list by a tag or a collection when you want that group on screen. The longer version of the search habit is how to search quotes from paper books.

The app does not search a book you have not captured, and it does not import Kindle highlights. There is no CSV export. When you want the notes on a computer, export writes Markdown, plain text, JSON, a Notion file or an Obsidian note. Notion is a Markdown file you import yourself, not a login to a Notion account. What each file contains is set out in exporting to Obsidian and Notion. The library stays on the device in this release, so the search still works on a train.