I recently came across a newly-designed book search engine, Booksprice.com, and thought it was worth mentioning for several features I found useful:
- A real cross-site search function: When you search for a title, Booksprice.com pulls up not only the typical monster book sellers (Amazon, Half.com, etc.), but many of the smaller book sites as well. Contrary to what you would expect, the mom & pop sellers sometimes have the lowest price.
- Speed: I think the site navigation could be simplified slightly, but you don't spend any time cooling your heels while you wait for results.
- Interface: While it's not essential for a shopping site to be good-looking, this one is. Maybe because I only buy good-looking books, this seems somehow fitting.
- Downsides? The only thing that comes to mind is the absence of a way to find a particular book edition when you search. If you want, say, the '90 version of P.D. James' A Taste for Death as opposed to the glossy new one, you'd have to dig around at the specific sites that Booksprice.com links to.
2 comments:
You guys are probably already familiar with bookfinder.com. I heard about it several years ago when I asked a used book dealer for a title he didn't have and he recommended I search there. They are great for hard to find books and older editions (though I'm not sure if you can search by that criteria or if you just have to wade through the results)
Yeah, I like Bookfinder. Last time I used it, the site seemed kind of clunky, but they do seem to feature a lot of hard-to-find books. Alas, our bank account mandates that we read very few hard-to-find-books these days, though. For the time being, we're doomed to read ubiquitous literature.
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