Bibliography maker
Paste the ISBNs of every book you used and get one alphabetized list, ready to copy.
Commas, spaces and new lines all separate ISBNs. The address of the result page saves your list: bookmark it to come back.
How it works
Type or paste the ISBN of each book you cited, one per line, and choose a style. OttoBib looks up every edition and returns a single list, sorted and formatted for the end of your paper: a Works Cited page for MLA, a References list for APA, a Bibliography for Chicago, or a set of BibTeX entries for LaTeX.
The ISBN is printed on the back cover and on the copyright page. Use the ISBN of the copy you actually read: a paperback, a later edition and a translation each have their own, and each is cited differently.
How the list is ordered
MLA, APA and Chicago all alphabetize by the first element of each entry, which is normally the author's surname. A book with no author is filed by its title, ignoring a leading A, An or The. Accented letters are filed with their base letter. BibTeX entries are ordered by citation key.
Formatting the page
Each style uses a hanging indent: the first line of an entry starts at the margin and the following lines are indented half an inch. The list here is shown that way; when you paste it into a word processor, set the indent in the paragraph settings rather than with spaces. How to build a works cited page covers titles, spacing and the common mistakes.
Saving and sharing a list
There is no account and nothing is stored. The address of the result page contains your ISBNs, so bookmarking it or sending the link saves the list, and opening it again rebuilds it from the same records.
When a book is not found
Books we have no local record for are listed separately, each with a link to its own page, which asks the national library catalogs for that edition. A missing book does not stop the rest of the list.