Forum OpenACS Q&A: Where to find best prices on 15 technical books?

1: Where to find best prices on 15 technical books?

Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 04/21/04 07:57 AM

Not infrequently, I end up with a big list of technical books (programming, databases, math, statistics, science, engineering, etc.) I'd like to buy, maybe only 3 or 4, maybe 15 or more. (It's not important exactly what books, but for flavor, stuff like Date, Grop, Hyvaerinen, Armstrong, or Williams.)

Those sorts of technical books are often very expensive, and since I'd prefer to buy many books rather than just a few, I am price sensitive. So, I find 15 ISBNs I want on Amazon, now I want to plug those into some service - all at once - that will search current prices across many bookstores and find me the best deal. Except, I can't find any such service!

I found no aggregators and only two online bookstores that even let me enter more than one ISBN at a time, bookpool.com and softpro.com. (On other sites, the errors from entering more than one ISBN at a time can be mildy entertaining.) And neither of those bookstores carries more than 1 or 2 books out of the 15 I happen to be trying to find right now - which is useless.

So, is there a better solution out there? What do other compulsive mass quantity book buyers here do?

2: Re: Where to find best prices on 15 technical books? (response to 1)

Posted by David Cotter on 04/21/04 10:32 AM

Not a solution to your problem but since we're in the subject Mozilla/Firefox has a useful plugin for browsing/searching amazon.

http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#amazonsearch

3: Re: Where to find best prices on 15 technical books? (response to 1)

Posted by David Cotter on 04/21/04 10:49 AM

I meant this one actually:

The Mozilla Amazon Browser (MAB) the above one is not so useful.

http://texturizer.net/firefox/extensions/#mozamazon

4: Re: Where to find best prices on 15 technical books? (response to 1)

Posted by Vamsee Kanakala on 04/21/04 12:51 PM

You can check out isbn.nu. It does a comparision of 10 online booksellers. Since you're looking for entering multiple ISBNs, I think it would be easy to write a small webservice that feeds isbn.nu these numbers and gets back the results. I remember doing this something like this before, but for the life of me, I cannot find that code :) Since the url goes something like http://isbn.nu/0001024671 where the number is the ISBN, it should be hassle-free.

5: Re: Where to find best prices on 15 technical books? (response to 1)

Posted by Michael Bluett on 04/22/04 10:04 PM

There's a big list of US (that is where you are?) Book comparisons on Dmoz.org in this category: Books/Searches, isbn.nu seems to have a "shopping basket" function, though I'm not sure if that's what you want (I'm not sure it is fully functional?). I link to this category on my US/International price comparison sites page.