Artificial Intelligence Review https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-018-9647-x Social Book Search: a survey Ritesh Kumar 1 · Rajendra Pamula 1 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018 Abstract Social Book Search is a new area of social search. In the modern world everything is going to be amenable due to the web and social media. The web and social media give us access to a wealth of information, not only different in quantity but also in character. Traditional descriptions from professionals are now supplemented with user generated content. Although books have been the predominant source of information for centuries, the way we acquire, share, and publish information has changed and has been changing in fundamental ways due to the web. In the modern era, in order to purchase a book, the users are not only depend on the title, author name, publisher etc of the book available as controlled metadata but also on other aspects which include the reviews, editorial reviews etc available in different social media. Our primary focus in this survey is to describe the features of different social cataloging book sites as well as their recommendation based on books. How the online searching of books is useful to the user and up to what extent, and what are their aim are some of the issues we shall deal with. We will also discuss evolution of those techniques for Social Book Search presented over years at the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX) and Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum (CLEF). To what extent the features and functionality of a social sharing platform influence the user behavior, is also discussed in the paper. This survey provides an overview of research done in the area of Social Book Search from perspective of Information Retrieval. Keywords Social Book Search · Book recommendation · Language modeling · Vector Space model · Boolean Retrieval model · Information Retrieval 1 Introduction Social Book Search (SBS) is one of the emerging application of Information Retrieval (IR). IR is a discipline of computer science that discusses the technique of acquisition, storage, indexing and retrieval of information according to users need and evaluation of those tech- B Ritesh Kumar ritesh4rmrvs@gmail.com Rajendra Pamula rajendrapamula@gmail.com 1 Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (ISM) Dhanbad, Dhanbad, Jharkhand 826004, India 123