Book Finder
Match your preferences to our catalog. Filter by category, subject, length, and reading time to discover books that fit your current mood and available time.
Do more with this book catalog
Welcome to the IJAWU Public Domain Literature Library, a curated collection of 99 classic works across four themed categories. Whether you are exploring historical fiction, fantasy, adventure, or utopian tales, our reader tools help you find, compare, and understand these texts.
Each tool serves a distinct purpose. The Book Finder helps you match stories to your current interests. The Comparison Tool examines how books align by subject, length, and style. The Reading Companion provides honest estimates of reading time and structural details for planning your reading.
99
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
99
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Compare Books
Select any two books to see how they compare in word count, reading time, sentence length, and subject matter. Useful for choosing between similar titles.
Reading Companion
Get estimates of reading time and text structure for each book. Understand the scale of the work before you commit to reading.
Miss Billy — A Reader’s Guide
When you open the IJAWU catalog, you are looking at ninety-nine public-domain titles spread across four broad categories. The median book runs about 59,000 words, which translates to roughly 258 minutes of reading time. But those averages hide a wide range: some books are under 20,000 words, while others exceed 200,000. The tools on this page—Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker—are designed to help you navigate that variety, but they serve different purposes.
Book Finder helps you narrow down the catalog based on your interests and available time. Compare Books lets you put two or three titles side by side to see how they differ in measurable ways. Reading Tracker then helps you plan your daily progress once you have made a choice. Using them together turns a large, undifferentiated list into a manageable shortlist and a realistic reading schedule.
Start with Book Finder to Set Your Boundaries
Book Finder is the natural starting point because it lets you filter by category, length, estimated reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, and even specific subjects. For instance, if you are in the mood for a story about orphans and young women navigating life, you might search for the subject "Orphans -- Fiction" and find Miss Billy — A Reader’s Guide, which is a 58,985-word exploration of that theme. The filter results are not judgments of quality; they simply reflect what the catalog contains.
The catalog has four categories, with Historical Psychological Social Fiction holding 41 titles, while the other three categories each have about 19 or 20. If you prefer a particular category, you can select it and immediately see how many books remain. You can also leave criteria as "no preference" without penalty, which is useful when you are flexible about length or reading time but have a strong subject interest.
Use Compare Books to See the Trade-offs
Once you have a shortlist from Book Finder, Compare Books lets you examine the details side by side. The comparison may include word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, subjects, and page information when available. These metrics are descriptive, not evaluative. A book with a high sentence-flow number is not better or worse; it simply uses longer sentences on average, which might affect your reading pace.
Suppose you are torn between a short story collection and a novel. Wessex Tales — A Closer Reading, at 86,145 words and 11 text sections, offers a different commitment than Those Extraordinary Twins — Key Ideas to Explore, which is only 24,773 words and 3 sections. Comparing them side by side makes it clear that one is a quick evening read while the other is a more sustained engagement.
The comparison tool also shows subjects, which can reveal unexpected connections. Two books might share a subject like "California -- Social life and customs -- Fiction," even if they come from different categories. That kind of cross-category link is easy to miss when you browse the catalog by category alone.
Track Your Progress with Reading Tracker
After you have chosen a book, Reading Tracker helps you plan your reading sessions. You set a daily page goal, and the tracker estimates how many days it will take to finish based on the total page count. The default daily goal is 20 pages, but you can adjust it to fit your schedule. The tracker stores your progress in your browser, so you can return to it over multiple sessions without losing your place.
The tracker uses an estimated page count based on 250 words per page when a fixed count is unavailable. You can also replace that estimate with the total page count from your own reading app or edition, which makes the tracker flexible for different formats. The remaining time is calculated proportionally, so if you are halfway through, you can see exactly how many minutes of reading are left.
Using the three tools together creates a smooth workflow: find a book that fits your interests and time, compare it with alternatives to confirm your choice, and then track your progress to stay on pace. The tools do not tell you which book is best; they give you the information you need to decide for yourself.