19 ms·
Show HN: I built a site that finds the cheapest place to buy a book
- pasttense01 4y agoNot useful. I searched for "calculus". It returned 12 entries. But there are at least many hundred titles with "calculus" in the title. If you want a really comprehensive search try: https://www.vialibri.net/ https://www.vialibri.net/
- shnksi 4y agoThe 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.
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoWould be nice to search by ISBN. I tried some titles and didn’t get the right matches
- iambateman 4y agoThis is cool. There’s still work to do but I searched for a book I’m interested in (Lost City of Z) and found it for $4.50 instead of $10. Thanks for helping me save $5! Great start!
- shnksi 4y agoThanks very much! If there are any features that would improve the site in your opinion please let me know and I'll build them for you :)
- john-tells-all 4y agoI read that book! It's a wonderful adventure, enjoy!
- steven_noble 4y agoI'm a huge fan of Booko, which has been doing exactly this for years
- teki_one 4y agohttps://booko.com.au/ 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.
- shnksi 4y agoBooko is fantastic, I just find their service a little lacking outside of Australia.
- wizofaus 4y agoIt 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.
- jvilalta 4y agoNot working with pi-hole. Some link synergy link. I searched for accelerate in case that's useful.
- shnksi 4y agoI'll take a look
- shnksi 4y agoLooks like pi-hole only looks at the base domain which breaks most of the affiliate links on the site, I'll see if I can find a workaround
- jonas-w 4y agouBlock origin immediately warns me when clicking on a book, as it is a ojrq.net url, that is probably dns blocked by pi-hole?
- bdbenton 4y agoBookmarked, pun intended. 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.
- shnksi 4y agoThanks! If you have any feedback or criticisms at any point please let me know. I've got a feedback box on the site as well.
- ck2 4y agoalso https://bookfinder.com https://bookfinder.com
- aix1 4y agoThere's also https://www.usedbooksearch.net/ https://www.usedbooksearch.net/
- BrianHenryIE 4y agohttps://www.libraryextension.com/ https://www.libraryextension.com/ is a browser extension which tells you if a book you're browsing on Amazon is available in your local library.
- aix1 4y agoWhat an amazing idea! (I've just submitted a request to have my local library added.)
- nestorD 4y agoI 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.
- ornornor 4y agoIt’s my go to. It handles currencies and location for shipping very well. It’s also an “old school” website that’s very very fast with minimal js. Love it.
- bondant 4y agoYes bookfinder.com is great. For French books I also like https://www.chasse-aux-livres.fr/ https://www.chasse-aux-livres.fr/ which also search in some local french websites for used books.
- lukecameron 4y agoPretty helpful! I would probably use this if there was an option for audiobooks.
- shnksi 4y agoI've got filters in the works, audiobooks is a great one I'll be sure to throw that in. I'm aiming to have those live within the next week.
- reayn 4y agoLove 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.
- jschveibinz 4y agoWorked really well. Thanks!
- shnksi 4y agoThanks! Let me know if you have any feedback or criticisms I'd be happy to make improvements.
- kjkisielewicz 4y agoReally cool, how are you planning to monetize? Have you considered just allowing people to purchase on your site?
- shnksi 4y agoThanks! 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.
- indigodaddy 4y agoWhile 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.
- bckygldstn 4y agoNice site, and good luck! 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-website https://www.ajnisbet.com/blog/maintaining-a-zero-maintenance...
- shnksi 4y agoThanks 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.
- thangalin 4y agoGood start! Not quite the cheapest, though! https://i.ibb.co/bF8nVjV/gone-with-the-wind.png 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.
- shnksi 4y agoThe prices on Pages on Pages include shipping costs, I probably should be more clear about that on the page itself. Thanks :)
- solatic 4y agoShipping 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.
- shnksi 4y agoReally 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.
- sjs7007 4y agoGuess who owns abebooks now?
- barbazoo 4y agoFunny, 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.
- shnksi 4y agoWhat do you look for in a bookstore that makes them more responsible (apart from no Amazon) ?
- lostcolony 4y agoNot 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.
- OhNoNotAnother1 4y ago
- shnksi 4y agoIf 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?
- CompleteWalker 4y agoCheck out https://bookshop.org/ 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.
- shnksi 4y ago
- numlock86 4y agoTrying 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 ...
- shnksi 4y agoSorry 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.
- sheepdestroyer 4y agoI was confused for a second too. It seems that fixed book price is more the exception than the rule. I just took it for granted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price
- RheingoldRiver 4y agoThe entry in that table for Norway seems likely outdated, maybe someone here from Norway can update it? > 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
- bufferoverflow 4y agoI've compared a bunch of book price comparison sites, and AddAll has been consistently the best or second best. https://www.addall.com/ https://www.addall.com/
- glaucon 4y agoThe 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.
- shnksi 4y agoits on the way I promise - depending on your region I'll have it running between 1 week and 1 month from now.
- smcleod 4y agoNeeds a toggle to filter out Amazon owned companies.
- shnksi 4y agoVery high on my priority list, will have this done before the end of the week.
- ChaitanyaSai 4y agoThis 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. 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 https://github.com/OpsopiDev/extpricext Anyone with javascript experience should be able to fork this and add niche sites they like with little work.
- shnksi 4y agoThanks for this. An extension is the next major step for this product. Your tool looks really good.
- kennyloginz 4y agoNo one wants more extensions
- shnksi 4y agoThat'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.
- bee_rider 4y agoI found someone who does, in fact they were just a tiny bit up from your post.
- AmanKishore 4y agoThis is great! Helps reduce search time a lot
- shnksi 4y agoThanks! Let me know if you have any feedback or criticisms, I'd be happy to address them.
- Hamuko 4y agoUS only.
- chatterhead 4y agoSearched 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. Recommended: $4.58 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31318413124&clickid=TpX3RvwpExyNWsi1AtW2YzX7UkDQvY1eE2nzTo0&cm_mmc=aff-_-ir-_-3640339-_-77416&ref=imprad3640339&afn_sr=impact https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3131841312... Found: $2.50 + $2.00 shipping https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31197921590&searchurl=isbn%3D9780880386722%26n%3D100121503%26sortby%3D17&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title2 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3119792159... Not sure how to takes shipping into account; but really solid results so far!
- lucasfcosta 4y agoThis is extremely useful. I’d just add that it’d probably be helpful to be able to add a few filters up front. I rarely buy used books or paperbacks, for example.
- shnksi 4y agoThanks for the feedback. I'll work on adding these filters in should have them running before the end of the week.
- braingenious 4y agoThis reminds me how I wish I hadn’t loaned my friend my copy of LSD by Otto Snow a long time ago. Apparently it’s $877 on Amazon right now. I bought it for like $30 at the time.
- Bakary 4y agoThis 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
- peterdunn1 4y ago
- ternaryoperator 4y agoOn your prices, if the amount ends with a 0, you lop it off. So $12.40 becomes 12.4. Dollar prices require two decimals.
- shnksi 4y agoYes that's something the program seems to be doing automatically. I'll add a check at the end to make sure that doesn't happen.
- socialismisok 4y agoIs "cheapest" the right objective? Because if that's the case, book piracy seems like the clear winner. But maybe we should consider "cheapest with some boundaries". For instance, we probably agree that bookstores are nice for a myriad of reasons, even if we don't frequent them. They employ people in the area, they offer curation and recommendations, they invite speakers and host events, and they help local authors get started. They may offer benefits or profit sharing. But a physical space like that costs money. Experience costs money. Curation costs money (indirectly). I'd argue that cheapest as a metric undercuts best as a metric. Cheap is one important input to the purchasing decision, but it shouldn't be the only one. We have to learn to accept some inefficiencies and some personal inconveniences for the sake of a healthier social ecosystem.
- kennyloginz 4y agoI think you might be confusing peoples desires of a physical book, vs bookstore?
- socialismisok 4y agoI want a book, I can choose to buy from a local shop or Amazon or print on demand shop selling a pirated copy. Those options are listed most expensive to cheapest. But a portion of the the sale goes to that business, who in turn passes it on to various places. The local bookshop uses the money to keep an asset in my local community and employs people in my local community. Amazon ships from a warehouse, and provides no local amenity. But they might employ someone locally. Maybe. The print on demand shop is giving me a counterfeit product, but it's the cheapest. It provides no local benefit. So I'm not confusing book for bookstore. I'm specifically saying that the second order effects of seeking the cheapest copy of a book have implications beyond the sale of the book itself.
- kortilla 4y agoYou’re conflating cheap with copyright violation, which is a bit disingenuous in an attempt I guess to guilt people for wanting to buy a cheap book. It’s fine to want a cheap book, want to support the publisher/author with a legit purchase, and not care about supporting a bookstore. Not everyone who likes books cares to keep alive the industry of physical books and bookstores.
- Hnrobert42 4y agoLooking for the book _Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy_ I searched for “Mechanical Accuracy.” While the site did find the book, it was the fourth one listed. None of the books above had “Mechanical Accuracy” in their titles. Maybe this is your desired behavior. I found it a bit odd.
- shnksi 4y agoThanks for the feedback. There are definitely still issues with search if the title is not exactly the same or very similar to the title of the book. I'm working on improving it but the fix is non-trivial so it will likely take a couple of weeks for me to improve.
- Prcmaker 4y agoI truly love that book. I haven't found it specifically useful, but as background information to linger in my brain. I recommend reading it to all my graduates, very few 'get' it though.
- trkaky 4y agothis isnt for e-books too right?
- shnksi 4y agoAt the moment its targeted at physical books. I've got plans to add filters and searches for ebooks but it likely won't be live until towards the end of the month.
- jakuboboza 4y agoit should have probably also found ISBN numbers as when i did a search for Achtung Panzer i had all language versions and releases mixed in results. So it might be fine for books with single release but books that have multiple release and versions and on top of that pictures can be less fun to check :) Maybe You should also cache results for like a 1-3 days or something.
- shnksi 4y agoGreat suggestions thanks. I'm working on a fix for ISBN numbers that will be up within a day. Caching is not something I've started on yet but it's a great idea I'll start looking into it shortly.
- shnksi 4y agoYou can search for ISBN numbers as well as titles now, hopefully that will help :)
- b3nji 4y agoExcellent, would it be possible to make it regional?
- shnksi 4y agoYes certainly, at the moment it's only optimized for the USA but I'm working on adding several other regions as we speak. The issue is I have to do it individually region by region which makes it quite slow. I should have 3 or 4 more regions up before the end of the week and I'll add a couple more on a weekly basis.
- psaux 4y agoI love projects like this! Great idea and motivation. I wanted to give a heads up that when I search for “Python for data analytics”, I get this awesome book “The Storm of Bringer by Isabel Cooper”. I know you are still working on the site, so it was a good giggle, put a smile on my face. You gotta see it for yourself, contextual a warrior repping python.
- shnksi 4y agoahaha it seems to be linking through to a booksite where the title of the book is "python 3 and data analytics" but the book image is The Storm of Bringer. Brilliant spot.
- iterm2 4y ago$100 ?? its $30 in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RMSHYGG https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RMSHYGG
- shnksi 4y agoThe $100 options on the bottom of the page are actually a bug, sorry about that I'll set up the system to ignore them. The page is sorted by price though so if you look at the top of the page you should be able to see much cheaper options.
- shnksi 4y agotry inputting the full search term - "staff engineer: Leadership beyond the management track" the search can get a little buggy without it
- neilv 4y agoIt seemed to fail my first test. I used pagesonpages.com search for "rust", clicked on a search hit (Blandy, et al., Programming Rust, 2e) showing price of $50.84, which loaded the product page on bookdepository.com, showing paperback for $50.84. Then I separately searched on the Amazon site, and they showed paperback for $32.49 (shipped&sold by Amazon).
- shnksi 4y agoIt behaves a little strangely if it doesn't receive a full book title. I'm working on improving that.
- BaudouinVH 4y agoUsing my FF with some privacy/adblocking extensions - clicking on every (affiliate) link resulted in a connection failed error. #my2cents
- BaudouinVH 4y agoworks fine on another browser without extensions - trouble on my end then
- shnksi 4y agoYes it seems some adblocking extensions interfere with the affiliate linking, I'm going to build something that detects adblockers and then gives the raw link if an adblocker is active. Should fix your UX issues in your normal browser.
- nine_k 4y agoWhat would be interesting to me is finding a place where the largest share of my payment goes to the actual people who worked on the book (authors, editors, etc). Also, I'm rarely interested in physical books, so that place should also offer a book in a non-rented electronic form. With DRM if they must, I can find a copy on libgen anyway if the DRM is too onerous.
- NelsonMinar 4y agoShout out to https://isbn.nu/ https://isbn.nu/ which has been online doing book price comparison for 20+ years. It's by Glenn Fleishman, better known as an Internet journalist, and is one of the best examples I know of a simple commerce microsite.
- thesaintlives 4y agoThat is indeed a nice little microsite. Thanks!
- gverrilla 4y agoit seems this site breaks when you search for non-English books :/ try "charles fourier", and you will get something like this: "Product Description: "Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinées générales - Tome I" de Charles Fourier. Philosophe français, fondateur de l'Ãcole sociétaire (1772-1837)."
- thesaintlives 4y agoGreat post. As an aside the cheapest place I ever found to buy a book was the country India. Books at literally a fraction of the price you would pay in Europe or the USA...
- shnksi 4y agoThanks! Once I'm done accommodating more regions into the tool, it should also allow filters for international shipping which will ofcourse have much higher delivery times but as you say will often be significantly cheaper overall.
- polyamid23 4y agoYou might have to account for toll fees since the price does not represent the final amount of money one has to pay.
- shnksi 4y agoCurrently it's only accurate in the USA, I'm working on implementing more regions so that it is completely accurate around the world
- Labo333 4y agoI found a site that is even cheaper: https://z-lib.org/ https://z-lib.org/
- rapnie 4y ago"Cheapest" is not in my criteria. When I share book links I always take the time to find the original publisher and / or author's website and pass that around. Pay an extra dollar, where it is also more likely that more of that flows to the author/publisher. It is very easy to do a book search, find Amazon or Goodreads in top results, nice cheap and quick delivery, and just share that around. And helping the utter dominance of Amazon to become even worse.
- ricardo81 4y agofwiw I saw some DVD's listed, the search was for a book that was made into a film. I guess they can be removed if looking closer at the EAN/UPC. Also, nice work.
- shnksi 4y agoThanks! Yes some of the bookstores seem to return DVDs even when you explicitly filter them for only books. I'll look into implementing a solution on my end.
- jve 4y agoERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED ``` nslookup pagesonpages.com 8.8.8.8 DNS request timed out. timeout was 2 seconds. Server: UnKnown Address: 8.8.8.8 ```
- shnksi 4y agoSorry about that I think my server is struggling a little, I will scale it up right now.
- AndrewVos 4y ago"... in the US".
- shnksi 4y agoI'm working on adding other regions as we speak. It's quite slow because I have to add them in region by region, I'll have 3-4 more regions by the end of the week and then about 2 more per week for the next few weeks.
- treman 4y agoCheck out https://www.bokfynd.nu/ https://www.bokfynd.nu/ which does the same for the Swedish book market. This price agent, together with https://www.prisjakt.nu/ https://www.prisjakt.nu/, are my go-to sites for online purchases.
- almog 4y agoI've been using https://www.piranhas.co/ https://www.piranhas.co/ which also featured on HN and provide you with more details about the price comparison.
- victorp13 4y agoCould you put the name of the shop on each search result? That way people can better pick their shop of choice (and avoid the ones they do not want to buy from).
- shnksi 4y agoGreat idea. I'll implement that for sure. Another thing I'm working on is a "No Amazon" filter that just skips Amazon and any Amazon subsidiaries from the results
- johnorourke 4y agoI came here to suggest exactly that filter!
- lucas_membrane 4y agoThe no-Amazon thing is maybe a little complicated. Many 'independent' book dealers have deals with Amazon, for example to use Amazon's shipping, inventory, or print on demand infrastructure, to sell through Amazon either exclusively or non-exclusively, or to be a channel through which Amazon routes divests books returned to Amazon. Those deals with Amazon make Amazon money and make Amazon more powerful, because Amazon can impose anti-competitive terms on the potential competitors who make such deals with them. The California attorney general recently announced a suit to try to stop these anti-competitive b2b deals by Amazon, but it is very hard to constrain such Goliaths. I would rather exclude every seller who has any business relationship with Amazon from my book search results, but there is no way to know who does or doesn't, as there is no required disclosure of such things, and lawyers are good at hiding them. The market for inexpensive copies of books in the US is a complete mess, particularly wrt used books. If you look on-line, you can find lots and lots of used books for sale from book dealers. Many are priced way above what they cost new or what a similar new book would sell for today. Many books recently released are available in used condition at prices well above what the same books are still selling for new -- ie the original publisher's list price -- why is that? Even stranger, if you have used books that you have read and want to sell, you will have a very hard time finding any book dealers who want to buy them. Most used book dealers don't buy used books from people who buy and read books. A few will, but they are very selective and almost all of them offer only in-store credit, not money. But they all have lots of used books listed for sale at $20 to $100 or more plus shipping. Where do they get their books? Are books that we donate to thrift shops and library book sales getting recycled through the book dealers at such high prices? It looks like that may be what's going on. I know that these dealers have expenses, and many of them may not even be very profitable, but modern automation and materials handling machines are amazing and are supposed to allow very efficient management of inventories and sales, and that's not what we've got. If the typical used book was listed like on the OTC stock market, the bid price would be around 25 cents and the ask price would be around 50 dollars. Market failure. What's it take to fix it?
- IvanaDora 4y agoThis is actually really good. I just recently bought a book for my kid at a bookstorr, only to find it waaay cheaper a few days later in a different one. Don’t get me erong, love buying books but I fould have gotten two for the orice I paid for one.
- shnksi 4y agoThats great to hear! If you have any ideas or criticisms please let me know I'd be happy to implement them for you.
- yoyopa 4y agothis should be popular. people always like to compensate others as minimally as they can.
- Bakary 4y agoWell... yeah? We earn money by literally trading our life-force and time for it. If we wanted to compensate the most vulnerable members of society, booksellers and authors wouldn't be the first place to look for anyway.
- aronhegedus 4y agoThe website was down for me:( Sounds like a good idea though!
- shnksi 4y agoSorry about that. My server seems to be struggling a bit roughly 1 in 50 requests are failing. I'm scaling it up more right now, it should work if you try again.
- niklasmerz 4y agoAs a German I don't have to worry too much about the prices of books. We have Buchpreisbindung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchpreisbindung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchpreisbindung
- elcapitan 4y agoOne of the reasons why I routinely check used books first to get around that high price guarantee.
- Alex_X-PressOne 4y agoIt's funny how this comment seems to have most upvotes. Good morning fellow germans ;) It adds no real feedback to the original post but shows how much we germans love our Buchpreisbindung.
- MrGilbert 4y agoAnother German here. I don’t know… Buchpreisbindung sucks when it comes to eBooks. It would be awesome if you could get the eBook at a reduced price if you have the physical copy.
- wink 4y agoIsn't that 100% on the authors/publishers? Such deals exist, bundling the ebook version for technical books. Might be misremembering, but some authors (of tech books, fwiw) always were happy for that feature. But then again they usually don't live off the royalties, but are developers/consultants anyway.
- mynameisvlad 4y agoAmazon did this for a bit with some of their physical books, especially if bought from their retail stores. Looks like they shuttered this system in 2019: https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/09/30/amazon-is-shutting-down-kindle-matchbook-its-printebook-bundling-program/ https://the-digital-reader.com/2019/09/30/amazon-is-shutting... They do offer a discounted Audible book if you own the eBook: https://www.amazon.com/hz/audible/matchmaker https://www.amazon.com/hz/audible/matchmaker
- _tom_ 4y agoso, doesn't look like it's finding the cheapest. You should probably check against amazon as a sanity check. (I was ignoring shipping, here) Do you take shipping into account?
- shnksi 4y agoYes it takes shipping into account but it's only optimized for USA users at the moment, if you're anywhere else your results might not be entirely accurate. I'm planning on adding support for more regions over the next couple of weeks.
- bloak 4y agoI wish there were an easy way to look up which charity shops in my area have a copy of a particular book and how much it costs. A lot of them already keep track of who donated each book to them if the donor has made the appropriate declaration for gift aid so they are already tracking individual books. All it needs is a bit of organisation, perhaps, to put all the data in one place. I don't think they'd have a reason not to use such a system if it existed. In a few cases they might be forced to lower prices or fail to sell a particular book but I would guess it would be a net gain for everyone.
- mcv 4y agoNice! But does it account for shipping costs? When ordering from overseas, sometimes shipping costs can be more than the price of the book. Considering your site doesn't ask for my location, I assume it doesn't account for that. Might be a nice feature to add.
- shnksi 4y agoI do grab your country from your IP address on your arrival on the site. However, the site is currently only optimized for US visitors. So the pricing and delivery time is only fully accurate if you're in the US. I'm working on adding support for more regions and should have several more regions ready within the next couple of weeks.
- andrewstuart 4y agoHow about "finding the site that best supports independent booksellers"? Its disappointing that so much of our society is about cheapest price.
- greenie_beans 4y agoindiebound does this, here's an example: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780988518391 https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780988518391
- rolae 4y agoBookshop.org is about that, privately funded with the objective to let independent book sellers stand up to the power of amazon. https://bookshop.org/info/about-us https://bookshop.org/info/about-us
- criddell 4y agoIsn't Bookshop.org really just Ingram Content Group?
- greenie_beans 4y agoyeah bookshop hardly counts for a win for the indies. it's basically affiliate marketing if you're an indie and you link to "your" bookshop
- peignoir 4y agolibgen?
- shnksi 4y agothis is more focused on purchasing physical books cheaply
- unhammer 4y agoPretty nice as a way of finding non-Amazon places to buy books. I don't care so much about cheapest, but I do prefer to support independent shops and authors. Any plans to add e-books, preferably with a filter to exclude those with DRM? (watermarking is fine, but adobe drm requires opening in windows and extracting things with dedrm, such a hassle / business opportunity)
- shnksi 4y agoI'm going to add a "No Amazon" filter in the next couple of days which excludes Amazon and it's subsidiaries from all searches. I also plan to add ebook and audiobook support but that will likely take until the end of next week until it's operational. If there's anything else you want to see please let me know, I'd be happy to build it for you.
- benevol 4y agoI second the non-Amazon approach. We should make it a point to put our money where our mouth is.
- sireat 4y agoNice work! Works better than expected in Europe. That's a compliment! Many price comparison sites will show seemingly cheap books. However once you add in VAT and shipping they become quite expensive. After Brexit, Amazon(especially amazon.co.uk) became expensive to buy English language books for mainland Europe.
- shnksi 4y agoI'm working on better optimization for other regions, depending on your region I'll have it up between 1 week and 1 month from now.
- weavie 4y agoI have a question. How do you get the catalogue of books? Have you had to scrape a whole bunch of book stores, or do you make a ton of api calls? Do you store all the catalogues on your server, or are you calling a search on each of these sites live?
- shnksi 4y agoIt's both scraping book stores and calling APIs, I do not currently index anything and do all searches live. I'm working on building in caching and eventually indexing to make everything more efficient, but since the async live searches take roughly 4-7 seconds it's not too bad at the moment.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoIts sad I've looked up old books on Amazon and come to discover via the reviews that there are counterfeit e-books on their platform. I would of thought that if I wanted an e-book of all places to look Amazon would be a pretty safe bet. I never did find the book I wanted on there. This is why I've sort of sought other alternatives. I enjoy my Kindle for reading when my iPad is just too much (laying in bed at night for example, I don't need all of my iPad if a Kindle suffices). So I applaud any efforts towards improving online book purchases since, Amazon which is a tech behemoth built on top of online book sales cannot do its original task very well.
- shnksi 4y agoI don't have ebooks on the platform quite yet but I should have them running before the end of next week, alongside the "No Amazon" filter that will ignore Amazon and any subsidiaries from searches.
- giancarlostoro 4y agoI mean, even a text book was a nightmare for me to look up on Amazon, because they let you self publish anything too... So I appreciate anybody trying to build something like this up. Curious, since I didn't look are you hoping to (or are you already) earn some side income to fund this going forward via affiliate links? I say this knowing full well, maybe some of the results wont get you any income, but the ones that do might be worth keeping in results. Side projects eventually burn a hole in your wallet.
- shnksi 4y agoYes, I've inputted affiliate links already, I don't expect to make a heap of profit but if it's enough to cover my expenses I'll be happy with the result.
- jawadch93 4y ago[dead]
- danparsonson 4y agoDon't want to disparage your efforts but the drive for 'cheapest' is a big part of the reason why we have Amazon instead of independent booksellers IMO.
- pessimizer 4y agoThis is the one that I've been using for the past 20 years. It hasn't changed at all and I haven't seen anyone improve on it: https://used.addall.com/ https://used.addall.com/
- aleku 4y agoThis is a good project; please keep at it. I think it might benefit more people in NA compared to the rest of the world. I did a quick search for "Flask Web Development", which I purchased one week ago on Amazon for AU$56($35). But it looks like I could get a used copy from AbeBooks (a result of a search on your site) for $8, the catch, I would need to pay $35 for shipping to Australia. If I had been in the US, I could have gotten free shipping or under $10 shipping which would make it all worth it.
- shnksi 4y agoI've just been working on this over the last 2-3 weeks so it's only optimized for the USA at the moment. I'm planning on have some popular regions such as UK, Australia, Canada, Germany, and India, functioning before the end of next week. Hopefully then you will find the product more useful :)
- bahahaha 4y ago
- lupire 4y agoNot every library has every book available.
- lupire 4y agoAbebooks et al works fine too. Better search interface, faster, properly formats prices, and doesn't add the affiliate commission to another middle layer. All the cheap booksellers post their catalog on all the syndication sites.
- logifail 4y ago(Sorry for sounding like a stuck record but) This site appears to use affiliate links/cookies/Google Analytics, so is surely collecting personal data in the GDPR sense? If so, why is there no opt-in/opt-out screen? The whole "ask for forgiveness not permission" thing is getting pretty old, why is it still apparently OK to build a shiny thing, make it live, and then think about compliance with the law?
- shnksi 4y agoThe site actually doesn't use cookies internally only session and local storage to hold variables through visits. I'm not based in Europe so I'm not entirely familiar with GDPR and how it relates to affiliate linking and google analytics. Thanks for pointing this out, I'll be sure to do some research and fix up the site to accommodate it.
- shnksi 4y agoI'm never holding PII at all except when you sign up to email updates
- logifail 4y agoMy $0.02 is that: If you're using Google Analytics to track visitors, you need their permission beforehand. If you're tracking visitors uniquely so that click-throughs to merchants earn you revenue via affiliate schemes, you need their permission for that, too. See https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/82133/are-auto-generated-identifiers-pii-if-they-cannot-be-linked-to-an-identity https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/82133/are-auto-gener...
- BeFlatXIII 4y agoDeveloped by people outside the enforcement of the EU? The law may technically apply, but how enforceable is it against a foreign national with no EU assets?
- logifail 4y ago
- DavorDK 4y agoWow, this actually works perfectly. I searched for a theme and for a not very well known local writer I know, and got decent results. Shared a tool with my book nerds immediately xD
- shnksi 4y agoThanks! let me know if you have any feedback or criticisms, I'd be happy to address them for you.
- mellowhype 4y agoI believe bookshop.org works someowhere along the same terms. Btw, I'm not a native english speaker, and I somewhat understood your tool looks for the cheapest place to stay. Now I have a page of results full with Waikiki books.
- xedrac 4y agoFirst few suggestions all sent me to sites that were down... also the search seems to not work great. I searched for: "Eat & Run Scott Jurek", and it couldn't find the book. But if I search for "Run eat run", it's the first suggestion, even though the search title is less correct and missing the author's name.
- shnksi 4y agoLet me know if you have any trouble with the site!
- martopix 4y agoIt doesn't ask for location at all, so it should really be called "find a cheap book in the USA".
- nocababges 4y ago[dead]
- anonym29 4y agoThere's already a site for that, and it's price is always cheaper than the best deals your site can find. It's called Library Genesis. Information wants to be free.
- AtNightWeCode 4y agoThe cheapest version of a title is probably not what you want. For new titles it kinda works. For old titles it can be a bit of a maze to find a good one.
- aaronhand 4y agoI use bigwords.com myself which has been around for a while and has quite a bit more features.
- aaronhand 4y agoI use bigwords.com which works well and has quite a bit more features like ISBN searches, selling/buying, shipping cost, book condition, book type (electronic, international version, etc), bundling multiple book purchases, etc. It was originally for textbooks, but I find that it works for any book.
- shnksi 4y agoISBN searches are now live, shipping cost is included in the price if you're in the US and will be reflected for other regions soon, book condition is included, currently the site only includes physical books but shortly I will add support for ebooks and audiobooks at which point I will include book types. Bundling book purchases will also be coming in the next few weeks.
- closetkantian 4y agoI just used this to order a book via Book Depository, and I'm somewhat concerned. The site never asked me where I wanted to have the book shipped, and just assumed I wanted it delivered to the address associated with my PayPal account, when in fact it was a gift. There was no way to change the delivery address after the order was placed. I had to send a message manually explaining the situation. :( I guess Amazon, for all its faults, has a few things going for it.
- shnksi 4y agoI'm sorry about that, that seems to be a flaw with their 'Checkout with Paypal' process. Hopefully it all gets resolved for you quickly.
- garfieldnate 4y agoMy #1 wish for price comparison in general is to include (estimated) cost of shipping. It's no good to find the cheapest, then figure out it's $20 shipping and need to go to the next cheapest, etc.
- shnksi 4y agoIt includes shipping costs accurately if you're in the US at the moment. I'm currently working on functionality to make it operate better in other countries, I will hopefully have that done in the next couple of days.