It may not always be obvious from the outside but we are constantly improving BookFinder.com to make it a better service for students, bibliophiles, collectors, and booksellers. Over the past several weeks one of our programmers, Bryan, has been working on a project trying to see if he could improve the speed of our book search.
If you know a little about databases, and little is a word I would use to describe my knowledge of database searching, one of the more classic search problems is that as the amount of data you are looking at gets larger it takes proportionately longer to search though all the information. So as you can guess this makes a quick search of millions upon millions of books from dozens of different websites all over the world a bit of a problem.
The fast solution would be to just limit our search time but we also know that you, our loyal users, come to BookFinder.com for our price comparisons of new and used books as well as for searching far and wide looking for rare, out-of-print, and downright hard to find books. So we obviously we could never sacrifice breadth of search for speed or you might not find that 18th century periodical on gardening practices in West Suffolk which you were looking for.
So when Bryan announced at our weekly meeting that, after some intensive investigation followed by a couple weeks of hacking away at our search algorithms, he had managed to shave several seconds off our average search time I felt it was worth a bit of a brag.
So enjoy our latest BookFinder.com improvement. Same great BookFinder.com search, now 60% faster.
I just stumbled over this cool blog posting which features some amazing bookshelves, here are a few of my favorites.
The Platzhalter Expanding Bookshelf... because a real bibliophile never has enough space
The Inverted Bookshelf The Bookmarkshelf
and my personal favorite which brings a whole new meaning to bedtime reading
Score one for eBooks as a learning tool. Jason Boog over at the GalleyCat blog made mention of what I consider to be a major advantage for students in cutting edge fields like Medicine. Instantly updated learning material.
When the publisher Little Brown issued an eBook only update about the H1N1 virus to their title "The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child" they explicitly showed that the publishers now have a way to combat the lag times of traditional publishing, they don't even have to abandon print editions.
By simply giving purchasers access to a continuously updated electronic edition a publisher can ensure a textbook buyer that they will have completely up to date and relevant information about their subject despite any advances that may occur. They could package the text like software giving you the base text and two years worth of updates with the first purchase. After the term the student/teacher/professional could opt for further updates for an aditional licence fee, keep the product as is, or buy the next edition.
This could also help reduce the number of new editions that publishers need to produce allowing them to move towards something more resonable like a 5 year publishing cycle for textbooks. The publisher is rewarded financially for keeping their text up to date, professionals no longer have to cross reference between texts and monthly journals, and students could be less crippled by debt.
Obviously this is less of a concern for some fields (I am constantly aggravated by the parade of new Calculus editions being produced despite the fundamentals remaining unchanged for centuries... but I digress), but for fast changing sciences like Medicine this is a huge development. Now we just have to see how it will be used.
Recently we've been working with our friends over at LibraryThing.com on a project to help their users more easily find the books that they need.
Now when you find a cool book on someones LibraryThing shelf, you only have to click "Get this book" from the side bar and BookFinder.com will find new, used, and rare copies from our bookstores. It looks kind of like this...
LT's Tim Spalding details the full depth of their project in an extensive post on LibraryThing's blog. We're just excited to help!
I was reminded by the Paper Cuts blog that one of the stars of our 2009 BookFinder.com Report, The Recently Deflowered Girl by Edward Gorey has just made the jump back into print! Finding a copy of the original is still a pricey endeavor but reprints are now easily attainable.
[Now Reading: The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick]
I just found this and thought that some beginner booksellers or collectors might find this of use. The Alaska State Library published a manual on book repair. It is an e-book and can be downloaded for free from the Alaska State Library site. It also appears that you may print it out for your own use as well as long as you are not selling it.
Hopefully this can be useful to some of our readers.
Released today is Barnes and Noble's entry into the e-reader wars. Dubbed "The Nook" it combines a color navigation panel (for browsing color book covers) with a 6" e-ink screen, mp3, and support for a number of non-proprietary formats including ePub and PDF.
Like the Kindle ,The Nook is wireless with the added feature that it seems you can share books with friends over a variety of other devices (iPhones, Blackberry's, etc) if you download some free software. The Nook however does not have the Kindles text to speech, has a shorter battery life, and is a bit heavier. The one piece of information I have not yet found is if the divice is supported outside of the US, drop a comment if you find out.
Several major news sources have been reviewing The Nook and are suggesting that it might give the Kindle a run for its money. We shall see what happens this Christmas I suppose.
If you want to see it at work Gizmodo, posted a neat video. I will be posting some more Nook specs on our E-books page tomorrow.
[Now Reading: Following the Equator by Mark Twain]
Not sure if any of you read the advertorial op-ed column in the New York Times last week where Google Technology President Sergey Brin voiced his thoughts on the Google books campaign but one sentence really irked me.
He cannot possibly believe that? All you have to do is type "Out-of-print books" into his own service and see AbeBooks, Alibris, Amazon, Biblio, BookFinder, etc offering more OOP options that you could shake a virtual stick at. The rest of the article reads like a cheap advertorial.
I'm not even versed enough in the whole Google Books rights controversy to say whether i'm for or against it (note: book lunch with Charlie, learn more) but this essay is trash.
[Now Reading: Our Man in Havana by Grahame Greene]
This morning, or evening if you happen to be in Europe,Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Müller originally published in Romanian and German however her works have been translated into several languages, including English. Most of these translations have been though small presses and now an increase in demand for her work is causing some temporary shortages in supply.
I just checked Amazon, and they appeared to be out of stock with many of her English translations but you can still find used copies from various booksellers. So I thought I would post some links for people looking for Herta Müller translations.
*edit* - I also just checked on AbeBooks.com and it seems that copies are flying off the virtual shelves there as well. If you don't want to wait for the reprints I would pick one up sooner than later.
So now that the BookFinder.com report has been available online for a few weeks, I wanted to mention a few of the interesting books which we were forced to cut from the list. By this I don't mean all of the thousands of in print books but rather books which nearly made the cut, I mentioned one such book in a post way back when I first started researching this years Report but there were many more.
One example is Dead in Dixie by Charlaine Harris which is technically out-of-print however after a short discussion we decided to leave this one off the list. You see the book is an omnibus edition of the first three novels in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series. All three books are still available and a boxed set as well as individual editions so we decided that Dead in Dixie failed to qualify.
Perhaps more interesting was The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing. This book was last published in 1998 and is most definitely out-of-print, but was only ever printed in England. So even though buyers in the US are eagerly looking for this book, and there are no new copies being printed, technically, we could not include in the list as it has never been in print in the United States.
The title which I was the most displeased with having to leave off the 2009 BookFinder.com report was Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: the story of Irena Sendler by Anna Mieszkowska. This would have been our number one Biography however this book was also never printed in the US.
The book details the work of Sendler who was a social worker who served in the Polish Underground during the German occupation and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Copies are very hard to track down and at the time of writing this post there are no copies available on BookFinder.com. If you like you can keep checking back here, but unless we see a reprinting I would not hold my breath
Outside of the great story within what made this book so interesting was that despite the fact it had never been printed in the US it was adapted into a "Hallmark Hall of Fame production", titled The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler and broadcast on CBS April 19, 2009. With that kind of press and huge search volume, I think a publisher could do well with a North American reprinting.
It's been hard to keep up with what's happening with the Google Book's settlement, but US Department of Justice recommending against the deal might have been the straw that breaks the camel's back. There is now a new deal in the works.
It's Banned Books Week very shortly and as a ramp up I was looking at some material about which books had been banned or challenged in the past few years, which is where I came across this map. I think it's really interesting to see, partly because I thought I might see a state or region pushing ahead in the number of bans, but in reality it almost looks like the population distribution. So much for my conspiracy theories.
Strangely enough no one found anything shocking enough to challenge in Las Vegas, go figure.
We have released the 2009 edition of the BookFinder.com Report.
The Report tracks the most sought-after out-of-print books in America, breaking down demand for popular out-of-print titles in ten different genre categories.
As usual this edition features a number of books with very interesting stories:
There are many more so go ahead and read the whole 2009 BookFinder.com Report
Also if any of you are interested I will be on CBC Radio One tomorrow (September 17th) on the All Points West program between 3:30-4:00pm PST. I will be talking to Jo-Ann Roberts about the BookFinder.com Report. If you like you can listen online here.
If you ever wanted to add a BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin the option is now available.
If you are about to ask "What's OpenSearch" it's that small search box to the right of the URL display on your browser. Here you can automatically search on your favorite website (obviously BookFinder.com, right?) without having to first enter their URL. If you want to add BookFinder.com as one of your search options It's very easy to do.
In Firefox simply go to the BookFinder.com homepage and then click on the small downward facing arrow like so:
From here just click the "Add "BookFinder.com" button and voila, instant BookFinder.com searches from anywhere on the internet.
In Internet Explorer the procedure is the same and the screen should look like this:
Now whenever you want to compare prices with BookFinder.com you can immediately do a keyword search from wherever you happen to be on the web without having to load our homepage.