I have recently become aware of the website New Books Network - from here, no less! - and am somewhat dumbfounded at this sudden trove of titles, with its implication of my ignorance. I used to usually type in google about a general topic, then trawl the results for any good book recommendations. Sometimes I'll find a n interesting book reviewed by someone on Youtube, sometimes I find an interesting title browsing a bookstore. But of course the heavy academic works are not so easily found.
Thus the question. Are there other history book catalogs/collections, aside from NBN? And maybe works in other languages? I know two other languages besides English.
Oh yeah, I've also been browsing the Thursday recommendations threads; found a few promising titles there.
For history books, various ways.
Reading academic journals (or at least their tables of contents) for review articles pertaining to the area(s) of interest you care about is one option. Another option would be to check specific publishers catalogues and their new releases on their websites, especially those that publish series on, again, what interests you (for me, for example, East Asian Monographs by Harvard, or Brill's Japanese Studies Library, etcetc.). Chances are high that publishers who publish on certain fields will do it again. Even if you have no access to the giant book repositories academic publishers (e.g., degruyter, Springer, Brill, to some extend also repositories such as JSTOR or Project MUSE) offer, you can still abuse them as a resource to browse for publications and then check if you can get them on a bookstore somewhere. A number of books are open access to begin with on these platforms, though.
Sometimes journals even publish bibliographies of the year's publications in their field or articles summarizing the state of a field of research, which is infinitely useful.
Browsing new releases in the history category on amazon works too, I do that over on their Japanese store for what they file under Japanese History, which is what I work in, and it helps me staying current (and noticing these doctoral theses which are sold out super quickly).