Book Price Aggregators
When buying books online, I’ve frequently used a web service that searches several vendors. BestBookBuys.com checks the standard new and used booksellers and gives the lowest price, including shipping, that each seller offers. I just found a more useful search tool. Bookfinder.com aggregates the prices not of specific sellers but of specific books. In other words, BestBookBuys might tell me that Amazon has used copies starting at price x and Alibris has a used copies starting at price y. Bookfinder, on the other hand, lists each copy that is for sale, giving a description and usually an ISBN or edition number. Thus, Bookfinder might reveal that Amazon has one cheap copy that is quite worn and also an out-of-date edition and that Alibris has a copy that is only slightly more expensive but that is also the right edition. Both services do include shipping costs when comparing book prices.
In the future, I’ll probably use Bookfinder.com for most of my book purchases.
Posted 7 Sep. 2007 at 5:57 am | Permalink
I’ve used Bookfinder.com for several years now and have been pleased by the leads I’ve gotten on used books. You can also get a pretty good idea about how rare a book is by running a search there. One mild surprise is how varied prices can be for the same book in roughly the same condition. Finding used books is one area in which the Internet has provided a spectacular improvement over the almost unbelievably difficult methods of the past.