Writing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for the craft of professional writing, including fiction, non-fiction, technical, scholarly, and commercial writing. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am writing a book that I plan to self-publish through Amazon's self-publishing service.
My book is non-fiction. Searching Amazon.com, I could not find any other book with my title, yet it seems a fairly generic title, and I'm very surprised it isn't taken yet.
Is there a larger database somewhere of all books in the ISBN that I can search to confirm that my book's title is in fact original?
You can use a Google Books advanced search to find book titles that contain specific words (or search in Google Books for a phrase with intitle:"search terms"). There are a lot of books that Google has indexed so you may get some obscure hits.
That being said, it helps to know that titles can’t be copyrighted, and can only be trademarked if distinctive, so the title being “taken” might not be an issue, at least legally.
A quick Google search can go a long way, and ISBN Search mentioned by Alexander may be useful as well. Even if you do happen to share a title with someone else, I don't believe it is the end of the world, just change it a bit or even go on with your title. You said the title is fairly generic, I don't think it's likely you'd get sued over sharing a common title.
