As my childhood hero, Ms. Frizzle of The Magic School Bus, used to say, “If you keep asking questions, you’ll keep getting answers!” And ask questions you did! Libby’s Technical Support team has fielded lots of questions, shared handy tips, and debunked many common misconceptions about Libby’s search tool over the years.

In the spirit of exploration and curiosity, let’s take a magnifying glass to the finer points of searching in Libby. Whether you’re brand new to Libby or you’ve been using Libby for years, these tips are sure to connect you with a book faster and easier.

The fundamentals

Libby lets you search by:

• Title (or subtitle)
• Author
• Narrator
• Subject
• Series name
• Award
• Publisher (or imprint)
• Keyword

How to refine your search in Libby

After running your search, narrow down your results with filters like format, language, subject, and more.

If you want filters to apply to all future searches automatically, you can pin them. This excludes all other titles that don’t fall into those criteria.

So, if you only ever listen to audiobooks in English, pinning the audiobooks and English filters will exclude all books and magazines and non-English language audiobooks when you browse and search.

Autocomplete: Offering a few suggestions for your search

As you type in the search box, Libby’s autocomplete will suggest titles, authors, narrators, and series it thinks you may be typing. It’ll suggest content from our catalog regardless of whether your library owns those titles.

If autocomplete gives no results while you’re typing, don’t give up! If you skipped a word, changed the order of words, combine multiple search criteria (like the title and author), autocomplete won't give you suggestions, but the search can still find titles.

Discover more with a tap

When you visit a title’s details, tap on an aspect of that title that piques your interest (like the author, its publisher, its awards, etc.) as a handy shortcut to search for more titles that match that criterion.

If I’m looking at Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars and want to see more Hugo Award winners, tapping on that award takes me to those award-winning books in my library’s collection.

Or, to see more titles by Mary Robinette Kowal, tapping on her name runs a search for her books.

What if I can’t find it in Libby?

The three most common reasons you won’t find a title in Libby include:

1. You might have typos.

Since Libby doesn’t use Google-style “fuzzy” searching to correct for spelling flubs, typos in the title or author’s name will prevent you from finding what you’re looking for.

So, if you search for “Otesa Moshfeg” and see zero results, double check your spelling so you don’t miss out on the Ottessa Moshfegh titles in your library’s collection.

💡 When in doubt, start typing out the title or the author’s name, then tap it from the autocomplete suggestions.

2. Your library doesn’t own it.

Turn on deep search to see titles your library doesn’t own yet. Share your interest with your library using a Notify Me tag.

3. Libby doesn’t offer it (yet).

Some publishers don’t offer their content through Libby yet, or they may offer certain titles exclusively through another platform. If a title doesn’t appear even with deep search turned on, let your library know you’re interested in seeing a specific title in Libby. They can always ask us to see if we can add those missing titles to our catalog.

How do I get exact results when searching in Libby?

If you sort a search by relevance, the most fitting results will appear first. But if you’re getting too many or seemingly irrelevant results for your search term, here are a couple tips to get more specific results:

1. Use both the title and author in your search.

Instead of searching by title or by author, try putting both the title and author in the search box. This is especially handy if an author is prolific or if the words in the title are common to other titles. For example, put Emily Henry Book Lovers in the search field instead of Emily Henry.

2. Use quotation marks.

Find the exact title or author you’re looking for by entering your search term in quotation marks (e.g., "Emily Henry" instead of Emily Henry).

Publishers sometimes provide keywords (like terms anywhere from “World War II” to “cheese”) relevant to the topics in a title. They may also include other popular authors in their titles’ data when they think a book would appeal to another author’s readers. That can make those other authors' books pop up when you’re not searching for them. Using quotation marks excludes these inexact results.

✨ BONUS TIP ✨

If you use Libby with multiple libraries

1. Pick which library to get a title from

If you’ve added multiple libraries, Libby will suggest the best availability for a title automatically. If you’d rather borrow or place a hold on a title from a different library, you can tap the borrow or place hold icon to pick which library to get that title from.

2. Searching all your added libraries at once

Libby doesn't currently search all your saved libraries at the same time when you enter a search term. Searching in Libby looks through your active library's collection, so your search results show titles that library owns. If your active library doesn't own the title you're looking for, one of your other added libraries might! To check, you can:

• Change your active library when searching by tapping the library logo in the top-right corner, then selecting another library to repeat the search.
• Turn on deep search to see all relevant results in the Libby catalog across all added libraries.

New features—coming soon!

A couple of new improvements have made finding the titles you’re looking for even easier:

🕒 Sort by audiobook duration
Looking for a quick audiobook to listen to over the weekend? Or do you want to sink your teeth into a beefy 50+ hour saga on your next staycation? Try out Libby’s new audiobook duration sort!

📚 Filter by “First in series” or “Standalone”
If you only want to see the first title in a series, apply the new first in series filter. Or if you’re not on the market for a new series, apply the standalone filter to only see titles that aren’t part of a series.

Ms. Frizzle put it best when she said, “If you don’t look, you’ll never see. And what you don’t see can be very hard to find.” So, whatever you may be searching for, I hope you find what you seek!