Even if you’re been around ebooks forever, you may be overlooking one of the easiest ways to search dozens of digital bookstores and public domain sites at once.

It’s the Get Books function of our old friend, the Calibre ebook management program (cost: $0). And as you can see from the screenshot it’s in the top menu bar. You can search by titles, author names, and keywords—and blend your criteria, so that, for example, you can exclude works with identical titles but different writers.

With this approach, your books public domain books can go directly into your Calibre library for immediate reading via the Calibre ebook reader or another program.

That won’t happen with commercial books—your Web browser will direct you to the appropriate store page—but there are other pluses, such as the ability to short by prices. Who knows? “Free” may be at the top of the list. Just keep in mind that copyright laws vary. What’s free in countries with shorter copyright terms may be legal in the U.S. and elsewhere only as purchases at stores.

Among the included sites are Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, Feedbooks, Google Books, Ebooks.com, Amazon, Kobo and B&N.

Imagine all millions of titles in your searches—for instant or almost-instant download. This is why one the major reasons why anti-bookers annoy me. Can p-book ever match ebooks when it come to finding the books about which you most care?

At a time when ebooks are under assault from other media ranging from video games to Netflix, choice is A Good Thing.

Detail: Calibre’s book search isn’t the last word. It didn’t show The Brass Check, the Upton Sinclair classic on sleazy journalism, as being available from Google Book even though it’s indeed there.