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How do you track down specific e-books—and compare prices?
September 24, 2009 | 2:40 am
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By David Rothman
Ficbot’s detailed tips for publishers will be along later today—for example, her advice to clear up confusion on e-book formats and pricing.
But meanwhile here’s a post for shoppers. How are you looking for specific e-book titles and comparing prices? Just what search engines are the most helpful? Other techniques?
One possibility, noted by Frode Aleksandersen, is eBookPrice.info. Have you tried it? How helpful is it for locating titles—and the best prices? In the U.S., the site covers amazon.com, booksonboard.com, cyberread.com, diesel-ebooks.com, ebooks.com, ereadable.com, fictionwise.com, powells.com, sony.com and textbooks.com. In the U.K., it compares waterstones.co.uk and borders.co.uk.
Needless to say, a major question arises here. How about well-run e-bookstores that don’t offer the best prices but have well organized sites and exemplary services?
If price is the only major factor, will we be giving away the game to Amazon? And I’m not just talking about online. How about indie bookstores in the real world, offline? Here in the D.C. area, the wonderful Trover Shop just closed its Capitol Hill store, partly due to Internet discounters.
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Comments:
I tend to use ebookprice.info quite a lot, but it doesn’t tend to be very accurate. Based on my limited understanding that’s possibly because the booksellers aren’t too quick at updating their databases or … something.
What I do know is that when you type the name of a book into the ebookprice searchbox and get zero results, the same title frequently *does* turn up when you directly search for it on the associated websites – BOB, Fictionwise, etc.
So – useful, to a degree, but not particularly reliable as yet.