The goal of this site is to tell you the cheapest place to buy a book assuming you already know the title. So if you wish to search "Calculus" it's perhaps not the site for you. If you instead search for "Calculus Made Easy" you will get much better results on where to cheaply buy that book.
https://booko.com.au/ is a great example of this. You search the title first, then you can select the concrete book/edition on the next page, then a nice list of options.
It is good but almost every time it ends up directing me to AbeBooks (now owned by Amazon) but on arrival they've come from "World of Books" - the postage invariably being 3 times the price of the actual book. Though it did just find "How the world really works" (V. Smil - actually there are a number of books with the same title) via a local distributor who had a free delivery promo on.
I am a writer and I love books, but I just don't want to work with Amazon or give them money for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post.
This is exactly the kind of tool I need to fill my shelves with great books without having to deal with Amazon. Very clean and efficient software that serves a useful purpose, it is deserving of success.
I was about to recommend it. The UI is lackluster but it doesa great job at collecting sources and taking both currency conversion and shipping into account.
Yes bookfinder.com is great. For French books I also like https://www.chasse-aux-livres.fr/ which also search in some local french websites for used books.
Love the cheeky jab at George R.R. Martin, the site works fantastically, though as others have mentioned an ISBN search would make the entire workflow miles more efficient.
Thanks! The immediate monetization is through affiliate linking to the various book sites that are aggregated. Letting people buy through the site would make for much better UX so that is certainly part of the plan.
While not the most modern UI in the world, addall.com has been around forever and still does the trick well enough for me. Although these days I usually just go straight to thriftbooks because I save money there with the free shipping (on $15 orders) and in the long run for sure with all their perks.
Thanks for this I just gave it a read. Sounds like you had quite the experience. I'll be sure to watch my scrapers closely, seems I may need to update them more often than I'd like.
Shipping is really difficult to get right, particularly across international boundaries, when you also need to include the price of customs.
Here in Israel, personal imports under $75 are customs-free and VAT-free, and with Amazon US granting free shipping for orders over $49, I typically just bundle 2-3 books into the same order to get into the "magic" range, where the total price is cheaper than it is for most Americans in the US (no sales tax). I have a very difficult time believing any other site could beat that pricing.
Really interesting insight, currently the site doesn't support bundling with multiple book orders, but if I build multiple book bundling and the site knows your location and can calculate full costs from the booksite itself with that info, it should be able to help you find the cheapest application of the "magic" range. I'll see how quickly I can make that happen for you.
Funny, that's not even my highest priority. I wish I could sort by how big or small they are, if they do anything particularly socially or ecologically responsible or something. I want to spend my money at good, human, responsible places.
Not parent, but I like, and try to direct money to, local bookstores that do events and provide spaces for small and local authors to reach the community.
If the site also parsed local bookstores (the ones that put their catalogues online) and allowed you to filter for local bookstores, is that something that you would find useful?
Check out https://bookshop.org/
Allows you to select a local bookshop to support. The book gets shipped directly from Ingram, with some of the proceeds going to the selected store.
I asked at my local bookshop if this was preferable to ordering the book with them and going to pick it up. They assured me it was, it saves them upfront costs and guarantees the sale.
I still go in when I can to browse new titles, but they don't carry much tech/computer related stuff.
Trying to make sense of this website, today I learned that Canada and the USA for example have no FBP (fixed book price) laws/agreements apparently. The more you know ...
Sorry for the confusion, the site hasn't been optimized outside of the USA yet, so some of your results may be a slightly off in terms of pricing and delivery times. Working on improving that as we speak but I have to go country by country so it's slow going.
The great thing about addall.com is that you can specify where you are in the world and it takes into account shipping costs. For me, shipping costs for single, second hand, books are routinely more than the cost of the book so this is really useful. They then go one stage further and allow you to specify which currency you would like the costs displayed in.
Perhaps www.pagesonpages.com will add similar features in the future, it can't be a simple thing to do but I appreciate it.
This functionality makes a lot more sense as an extension; it saves us the hassle of visiting/bookmarking a new site. It also saves you the hassle of building good search functionality, which is quite tricky for books if you are using titles and not ISBNs.
That's why I think it will be good to have both options, people who prefer sites can use the site as is, if you prefer to download extensions and forget about sites then that option will also exist.
Working on other regions, unfortunately I have to do it region by region which slows me down. Should have 3-4 more regions up by the end of the week and I'll be adding about 2 a week afterwards for the next few weeks.
Searched for Streams of Silver and got a higher priced book as a return than what was available on the site recommended. Seems that was because of the cost of shipping. Though it was only 0.01 more than what was recommended and didn't appear on the results.
It looks like this was happening because the book is too far down the list on that site so the algorithm assumes its unimportant. I'm improving the algorithm now to account for these cases.
This happens because bots dynamically change the price based on other bots, which creates feedback loops. Nobody is paying that much for a non-antique book
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[ 0.76 ms ] story [ 224 ms ] threadIf you want a really comprehensive search try:
https://www.vialibri.net/
Thanks for helping me save $5!
Great start!
I am a writer and I love books, but I just don't want to work with Amazon or give them money for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post.
This is exactly the kind of tool I need to fill my shelves with great books without having to deal with Amazon. Very clean and efficient software that serves a useful purpose, it is deserving of success.
It’s also an “old school” website that’s very very fast with minimal js. Love it.
I used to run a book price comparison site, it was fun though I struggled to keep the price scrapers up to date. I wrote a small eulogy here: https://www.ajnisbet.com/blog/maintaining-a-zero-maintenance...
https://i.ibb.co/bF8nVjV/gone-with-the-wind.png
* AbeBooks: $2.87
* PagesOnPages: $4.17
Disclaimer: I worked at AbeBooks over a decade ago.
Here in Israel, personal imports under $75 are customs-free and VAT-free, and with Amazon US granting free shipping for orders over $49, I typically just bundle 2-3 books into the same order to get into the "magic" range, where the total price is cheaper than it is for most Americans in the US (no sales tax). I have a very difficult time believing any other site could beat that pricing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price
> Law binding to all book sellers proposed in 2013, but unsure whether next parliament will repeal proposal before it takes effect.
I assume there's been a meeting of parliament since 2013
https://www.addall.com/
Perhaps www.pagesonpages.com will add similar features in the future, it can't be a simple thing to do but I appreciate it.
We put together an open-source version for this a while back, but it's been gathering dust ever since. https://github.com/OpsopiDev/extpricext
Anyone with javascript experience should be able to fork this and add niche sites they like with little work.
Recommended: $4.58 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3131841312...
Found: $2.50 + $2.00 shipping https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3119792159...
Not sure how to takes shipping into account; but really solid results so far!
I rarely buy used books or paperbacks, for example.
I bought it for like $30 at the time.