Find Your Book
Use the Finder to match books to your interests. Filter by category, subject, length, or reading time to see which works fit your preferences best.
Do more with this book catalog
The LIGOB Modern History Library brings together 94 public-domain works that trace the making of the modern world. You can explore revolutions, social change, and major conflicts through primary accounts and historical studies, each presented with tools that help you find, compare, and plan your reading.
The collection is organized into four areas: Modern Nations, World Events, Revolutions, and Social History. Across these categories you'll find personal narratives, campaign histories, biographies, and contemporary analyses. The reader tools on this page are designed to help you navigate this material by subject, length, and reading time.
94
books in this catalog
4
catalog categories
94
books with reading-time data
Made for this collection
Ways the catalog data becomes useful
Compare Books
The Compare tool lets you look at key details side by side, such as word count, sections, and sentence complexity, so you can see how different titles relate.
Plan Your Reading
The Reading tool estimates how long a book will take based on its length and your pace. It also breaks down the text into sections for a clearer picture of its structure.
Choosing, Comparing, and Planning Your Reading
The LIGOB Modern History Library holds 94 titles that range from short personal narratives to multi-volume campaign histories. The hub links three tools—Book Finder, Compare Books, and Reading Tracker—each designed to support a different stage of engagement with the collection. None of these tools rate literary quality; they help you decide what to read, how two or three books differ, and how to pace your progress.
A practical approach is to start with Book Finder when you are exploring, move to Compare Books when you have narrowed to a few candidates, and then use Reading Tracker once you have committed to a title. For example, if you are drawn to maritime disasters, the finder can surface Sinking of the "Titanic" — Themes and Context (id 305), a 104,147-word account with 13 text sections. Comparing it with a shorter work like A Noble Woman: The Life-Story of Edith Cavell — A Reader’s Guide (id 242) at 29,374 words shows how the tools reveal different commitments.
When to Use Book Finder
Book Finder is the entry point for most readers because it lets you filter by category, length, reading time, chapter rhythm, sentence flow, and subjects. The catalog’s four categories—Modern Nations (46 titles), World Events (28), Revolutions (10), and Social History (10)—provide a broad initial partition. If you know you want a concise account of a specific event, you can set the length filter to short and the time filter to quick, which narrows the field considerably.
The finder also accommodates readers who have only a vague sense of what they want. You can leave all criteria at no-preference, and the tool will not penalize any book. This is useful when you are new to the collection and want to browse without imposing arbitrary constraints. The subject filters are particularly helpful for thematic research, such as locating all five titles tagged World War, 1914-1918 or the three Civil War campaign narratives.
Once you have a shortlist, the finder’s role ends. It is not designed to show side-by-side comparisons or to help you estimate how long a book will take to finish. That is where the other two tools come in.
How Compare and Tracker Complete the Workflow
Compare Books accepts two or three selected titles and displays word count, estimated reading time, text sections, sentence flow, chapter rhythm, and subjects. This is valuable when you are torn between books that appear similar in the finder. For instance, comparing Sinking of the "Titanic" — Themes and Context (id 305) with A Noble Woman: The Life-Story of Edith Cavell — A Reader’s Guide (id 242) reveals that the Titanic book is roughly 3.5 times longer and has more than four times the text sections, suggesting a more sustained reading commitment.
After you choose, Reading Tracker helps you plan daily progress. It records pages, not minutes or sections, so you set a daily page goal and the tool calculates estimated finish days. The default goal is 20 pages per day, but you can adjust it to match your schedule. For a 104,147-word book, the initial page estimate is about 417 pages (using a 250-word-per-page conversion), which at 20 pages per day would take roughly 21 days. The tracker also lets you override the total page count if your edition differs.
Using the three tools in sequence—filter, compare, then track—turns an overwhelming catalog into a manageable reading plan. The hub exists to make that workflow explicit, so you can move fluidly from discovery to commitment without losing sight of what each tool is for.