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I'm responsible for recommending purchases of research level monographs to my university library. My job would be vastly simplified if I could find a website (say) that made it easy to scan a list of recent publications of that sort. At present I find I must visit the websites of dozens of publishers.

I'm open to any suggestions, but let me mention some resources which I already use, but only with effort and partial success:

1) The library catalogs of other institutions. -- Generally by the time another college or university has a book cataloged the book isn't current. Also searching by publication date, to get current books, seems impossible unless I'm already searching under fairly a narrow subject heading such as "algebraic topology," but that would have me making many dozen of searches.

2) Amazon (or the like). Great for currency, but not easy to narrow the search to research level books, and broaden the search to cover all of university level mathematics.

3) Notices of the AMS Certainly current and useful for AMS publications, but the advertisements would bias me towards big publishers and the particular books they choose to push.

Thanks in advance for whichever way anyone points me. If nothing of the sort exists, feel free to suggests ways to create, or induce the creation, of such a web resource.

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    $\begingroup$ The way I search Amazon for books is to make sure my Amazon history contains only math books and to repeatedly tweak the recommendations page until I see only books I don't have and that are related to books that I have. But I'm not sure how well that would work for your purpose. $\endgroup$ Dec 24, 2010 at 7:19
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    $\begingroup$ @Qiaochu: to get the same effect, would David need to create an Amazon account with all the books that are already in the library? :) $\endgroup$ Dec 24, 2010 at 9:30
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    $\begingroup$ You can search MathSciNet for recent books. Even though reviews take a while to appear, the bibliographic entry for a book is entered in the database as soon as MR library receives the book. $\endgroup$ Dec 24, 2010 at 11:27
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    $\begingroup$ Zentralblatt MATH can also be used to search for recent books. zentralblatt-math.org/zmath/en/advanced $\endgroup$ Dec 24, 2010 at 13:54
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    $\begingroup$ @David: I sympathize with your task, since good information about recently published books (including prices, reviews) isn't available in any single location. Libraries like ours often seem to rely on guesswork, though when their budget allows book-buying they do listen to specific departmental requests. But they hate to buy books published more than a year or two ago, whereas informed recommendations tend to come late. AMS Notices lists mostly general interest books. MathSciNet returns far too many books, say for 2010, including new editions; but you can limit subject numbers. $\endgroup$ Dec 27, 2010 at 16:04

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In addition to already said, virtually all major publishers (Springer, AMS, Cambridge Univ. Press, World Scientific, ...) have mailing lists announcing the forthcoming titles in the chosen subject area.

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