Show HN: I built a site that finds the cheapest place to buy a book | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a site that finds the cheapest place to buy a book

pagesonpages.com

345 pointsshnksi293 comments

Is "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.

I think you might be confusing peoples desires of a physical book, vs bookstore?

I 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.

You’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.

What is "fine" is a values judgement. I would say that there's a continuum that goes from downloading an unapproved copy (worst) to buying the book at a local bookstore (best), and buying from Amazon instead sits somewhere in the middle. Somebody else might find the whole publishing industry gross, and decide the most moral choices are to either pirate the book or buy a secondhand copy.

>buy a secondhand copy

the site's cheapest appear to be exactly that. not only is secondhand the cheapest legal, but also the greenest

>would say that there's a continuum that goes from downloading an unapproved copy (worst) to buying the book at a local bookstore (best),

Because you’re still fixated on bookstores, which tons of people don’t give a shit about. You’re incorrectly putting stuff on a one-dimensional continuum.

>or buy a secondhand copy.

Being a secondary market participant supports a market. If you don’t want to support publishers, it must be pirated.

I'm not trying to guilt anyone. Some folks need to optimize for cheap.

What I'm trying to say is that cheap might not be the best general metric, and laying out reasoning behind that.

I try to avoid saying that someone is bad for choosing cheap, and if I did earlier, I apologize. The goal is to say, "here are some conditions to consider when making a decision".

Print on demand is more expensive than Amazon for all but expensive technical books.

Thanks for your comment, all of that is certainly true. I'm thinking through a solution that would likely come in the form of certain filters on the site. I'd try to get your region as accurately as possible or ask for input, and then serve you local bookstores in your area that have their catalogues online. Something like this would help promote local stores and help you differentiate between your local bookstores. It's not something I've started building yet but what do you think of it?

I like it, but most of my local shops don't have their inventory or prices online, sadly.

Hmm that does make it difficult. Perhaps a solution that allows local bookstores to put their catalogues online easily, this data then feeds straight into the search product. It would be difficult and manual to make happen but it could be extremely useful.

This feels like a roundabout way to getting bookshop.org, which might not be the cheapest, but is simple to use as a consumer.

Not sure why local bookstores would like to participate in a race to the bottom, though.

Probably because Amazon is already competing with them, and they at least get some independent sales.

Spanish website Todostuslibros.com did exactly that.[1] It was sponsored by a private association of booksellers, with some public funding (this is a common approach in Europe).

[1] https://www-elconfidencial-com.translate.goog/cultura/2020-0...

Just as a counter. You are not obligate to listen to OP's comment, that is just one of the many perspectives that one can have around a book shopping.

Please go ahead and do build a hyper focused product which finds out most 'inexpensive' source for a book that one is clear about (that is, one is not in a discovery mode).

I'm sure there would be whole lot of students who would be super thankful about this service, there is enough of price gouging in educational segment. Even if you are not building textbook related service, still it would help.

Thanks for this. The focus of this product is cheap books. I do find it interesting to learn about different approaches to purchasing and purchasing decisions. In the long term, additional filters to support local bookstores could be a cool addition. Also, I'm looking into targeting textbooks more closely. Hopefully the textbook specific results will be better and cheaper before the end of the month.

that already exists: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780988518391

100% agreed. Whenever I see something being promoted as "cheapest" I try to stay clear. Not only because you often get what you pay for, but also for reasons like the one you mention.

I guess you wouldn't be buying it if you pirate it.

This is aimed towards physical books. Hopefully if people can access books legally and cheaply it will discourage piracy.

Sort of. Making used boo market more efficient distorts the market and causes a reaction in new book prices. In a perfect used book market, a new copy would cost over >$1000 and a used copy would sell for $5-20 less each time it changed hands.

Clearly this is the cheapest online and legal options. It would be odd and short-lived to include illegally shared books at $0, and a site that shows physical stores would also be odd, since if you are going to a local bookshop you are probably not price sensitive.

So for someone shopping online it a good objective, and may take away business from Amazon which is probably a good thing for competition. It is also useful in helping people find books at all, sometimes Amazon doesn't have everything, especially globally.

You can think of it as analogous to booking a flight. Do you want the cheapest flight with a 16 hour flight and 2 transfers with Ryanair? A lot of people don't mind paying a bit more for a direct flight and a complimentary chocolate (lot, swiss air), even if all are legal.

Some websites even included an option to check as "worry-free" or similar to filter out these cheap options.

Book equivalents could be quality of paper, status of the book, or having good customer support if there is a problem with the order.

>quality of paper

you are extremely unlikely to find this as book metadata

You do get "Condition of book" which isn't quite the same thing but helpful along the same thread

I would take a coffee-stained, dust-clad, sepia-ridden second edition from a proper publisher over the 20gsm, toxic-inked, loosely-bound crap churned out by Amazon any day

I ordered books under the public domain on Amazon. At least 50% were printed on the cheapest paper and on Demand. Some were printed from scans were part of the text is missing and looked like photocopies.

Just because the book is in the public domain does not mean I want a book that looks like a fanzine.

Maybe it does not scale, I agree. This is why a curator is IMO important.

I agree the quality of Amazon self-published books can be terrible, notably recipe books. just as youtube can make anyone a tv star, or spotify a musician, Amazon self-publishing means anyone can be an author now

as for the metadata, that would be retrospectively impossible. your best chance would be to filter out Amazon as a publisher

Online booksellers often denote "mass market" vs "trade" paperback which does potentially give you info on the quality of the paper.

"The paper quality is better as well, as most often they are printed on acid-free paper like a hardback book." - https://biblio.co.uk/book_collecting_terminology/trade-paper...

(I've found this to be relevant when sourcing physical copies of out of print books.)

But surely this website is comparing the same book. There should be no difference in quality of paper or condition of the book?

There shouldn't be, but sometimes there is and this is where a vendor's customer service comes into play.

I buy 10-15 books every year and almost all of them I order from the same place because they are reliable and provide great customer service when something does go wrong. Books are cheap enough and I don't buy that many so I'm not really very price sensitive.

Not for expensive books (like textbooks) where it is economical to print pirate copies, and where there are cheap international-market prints.

International market prints have a different ISBN so those shouldn't get mixed up. Pirate copies could be an issue, I have only heard about this issue on Amazon. I'm not sure about other stores? Skipping Amazon is likely sufficient.

It's comparing the same title (roughly, with some errors, but that's expected I think), and returning many editions. Some of those editions might be trade paperbacks, some might be mass-market on newsprint, depending on the book.

(One book I searched returned among other things an audiobook on cassette.)

I recently discovered that my local shop can sometimes order books at prices that are much better than Amazon ($80 vs. $110) and often not much slower (under a week, which is competitive with Amazon’s free shipping).

That's great, do you mind if I grab the name of one of these shops so I can look into including similar shops in the tool?

Perhaps you could hook into a service that already finds pricing and stock from local indie bookstores, like bookshop.org[0]?

0: https://bookshop.org/

Good idea, I'll look into it

I actually found it via the publisher. Penguin Random House has a service that does it, at least in Canada.

Try here https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/656337/neural-contro...

Hit "Shop Local" on a webpage and enter a post code. I don't want to give mine (they sometimes resolve to individual buildings) but H1A1A1 works.

Thanks, I'll check it out

>Because if that's the case, book piracy seems like the clear winner.

You can read lots of books for free legally in the Internet Archive, specially books that are out of print.

> Curation costs money (indirectly). This is mostly done by (big) publishers who want to push their shallow literature series and a couple of good books here and there. Which, again, makes places like the IA so much better for readers like me.

>You can read lots of books for free legally in the Internet Archive, specially books that are out of print.

maybe, but I guess there's also lots that are in a murky gray area

https://blog.archive.org/2022/09/03/internet-archive-opposes...

I see a lot of "staff recommends" on bookshelves when I shop local, with little blurbs about why the book has had an impact.

If I want to discover a book I don’t know about, curation provides value. If I want to attend an event, some place holding an event provides value.

If, on the other hand, I know what book I want, the curation is done and I’m not looking for an event, so cheapest seems a reasonable thing to optimize for.

cheapest seems a reasonable thing to optimize for

Until you find out that the cheapest source also waits two weeks to send your book. And sends it by a method that takes another four weeks. And doesn't package it properly so it arrives with the spine broken and water damage. And sends you a used book with pages missing. Or might just accidentally send you the wrong book but doesn't have a customer service contact.

The internet used to be a great place for bargains. Now "cheapest" is almost always the wrong choice.

The site also posts delivery times for vendors. It's usually fairly accurate even if it is a little longer than Amazon's 1-2 days, so at least you know what you're getting into beforehand.

That's one way to think about it. But that may not be enough to sustain the places that provide curation, events, browsing, etc, etc.

I've mostly stopped buying books from Amazon. I generally buy them from my local bookstore via their website. Because it turns out I like having a local bookstore, and I think Amazon has quite enough money and power already.

Ive been a huge fan of betterworldbooks since discovering it for university textbooks over a decade ago. They have a pretty massive selection and the money goes to some respectable causes.

Oh, neat! I would love to see plenty more not-for-profits competing with for-profit businesses. Especially when it's a stable, commodity business or something off the beaten path, it makes a ton of sense to me.

I'm sure BWB is fine. Anyway, you are also allowed to pay less at a different seller, and donate the savings to causes you respect. "Bundling" commerce and charity opens the door to risk of abuse.

In some sense, overpaying a local bookstore for a book you came searching for because you like the fact they do unrelated events and activities is a form of charity coupled with commerce.

I think we have to consider why books exist. There are many reasons such as disseminating knowledge, broadening perspectives, entertainment, but I would think one of them wouldn't be "to let people have a nice job in a shop".

Certainly, but also in terms of disseminating knowledge, broadening perspectives, and entertainment, if people are able to access cheaper books more easily, it will allow them to gain more of all of these things.

Yes, which is what Amazon and other online retailers (love them or hate them) has done for people.

Cheapest restaurant isn’t The French Laundry w/ the caveat that you skip out on the bill.

the title states cheapest place to buy a book, not the cheapesst way to acquire a book...

> Curation costs money

In my experience curation beyond the mass-market mainstream is the province of fora and clubs, rather than bookshops and public libraries.

The long-tail is so overwhelmingly long and thin that no general-interest vendor can hope to have any insight.

For buying an ebook, cheapest is almost always the best option - perhaps a better term might be "least overhead".

There's very little actually needed, for ebooks - it could literally just be a plugin for e.g. goodreads, with a "buy this book" button and then it triggers another plugin to send the ISBN to calibre or to download a torrent or do whatever you normally do with your ebook. The point is, the only part the shop really needs to handle is payment. And by "handle" I mean "delegate to paypal etc".

You think someone shouldn't use the word "cheapest" because they aren't factoring in piracy? Do you think stores that price match should sell an item for $0 if someone shows they can shoplift it?

The whole idea is absurd, why would you make a comment like this?

Small book stores are one of the least deserving businesses I can think of. They are no different from drop shippers or amazon resellers. These people buy things they had no responsibility creating and sell it to you for a higher price, injecting themselves as middle men to a transaction where it’s not required and then justifying it with a hobby job they made up themselves. The author gets nothing if the book is used so there’s no reason not to pirate. Cheapest is a great metric when you’re dealing with books.

Piracy is not paying for it. A qualitative difference, really.

As a German I don't have to worry too much about the prices of books. We have Buchpreisbindung https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchpreisbindung

It'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.

Another 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.

Isn'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.

Amazon 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...

They do offer a discounted Audible book if you own the eBook: https://www.amazon.com/hz/audible/matchmaker

Exactly, the cheapest and fastest way to get a book in Germany is most likely your neighborhood book store on the way back from work. (And if they don't have the book in store, they can order it for the next day.)

The local bookstore can even do same day delivery.

I find it hard to believe that local bookkstore catalog is nearly large enough.

They can get you everything through their wholesalers. Might take three days then, but there's a pretty tight-woven net.

You can always check out https://medimops.de for used books.

That's a great system that you have in Germany! Does it apply to used books also?

It doesn't, only for new books. Used or damaged books as well as clearance sales for example aren't part of this.

We used to have a similar price-fixing thing in the UK called the Net Book Agreement [1]. Thankfully it got repealed and books became cheaper for all.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Book_Agreement

"Thankfully" is an interesting view from the reader side. Would be interesting to know what was the impact on the authors side.

Got it cheaper because the authors got now less money or got it cheaper because the publisher got now less money?

Because I know, that (at least for technical books) the pay for the authors is not really great. It's more like a reputation than making money out of it.

Poor people should be able to buy books without having to subsidise your bookshop aesthetic.

Exactly. Enabling poor people to buy books is a far greater social good than having somewhere comfortable for hipsters to sit with their laptops and middle class mums to push their three wheeled buggies round.

Why? If you are poor you probably also have less real estate and so purchasing a non-trivial quantity of books is less convenient than borrowing.

Also not sure why you blast that sexism around.

Haha. "It doesn't matter if we make buying books expensive because poor people can't afford shelf-space." Nice.

Actually, you don't need to own a book to read it. We in Germany have a great concept for this, its called: Library, You can go to your local community library and decide to either read the book there or to take it home and read it where ever you like. The rent for the first 2 weeks or sometimes the first 4 weeks is free of charge.

These libraries these days even not only have books to rent out. They have online-books, games (like those physical games to interact physically with other people you like), and other medias.

Even the membership in those community libraries is mostly free of charge, with a few exceptions.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33149867

Libraries allow (not only) poor people to read as much books as they want for free or ~the price of a cheap book. That seems to be a much better mechanism to allow for literacy independent of income than trying to make books cheaper.

Why shouldn’t they get to own books like you can, without paying above market prices so middle-class people can have nice spaces?

Is that the main impact of the German law? I was thinking it might improve an author's chances of earning a reasonable amount of money from writing which I think could be a good thing.

Do you know if there's any correlation between the number of bookstores in a city and the amount people in those cities read? Is it possible that more expensive but also more ubiquitous books leads to more books being read, or are price and readership always inversely correlated?

>> Do you know if there's any correlation between the number of bookstores in a city and the amount people in those cities read? Is it possible that more expensive but also more ubiquitous books leads to more books being read, or are price and readership always inversely correlated?

I would say they are always inversely correlated if you are poor.

Does the German law also fix the price of used books? If not, then I could see how a thriving (but expensive) new book market could lead to a robust used market which could help readership.

Thanks for sharing, reminds me of another old revered law in Germany, the Reinheitsgebot. Buchpreisbindung was introduced in 1888 and according to the Wikipedia article it fails to deliver cheaper books and even indirectly subsidize large bookstores like Amazon.

One of the reasons why I routinely check used books first to get around that high price guarantee.

We have the same thing in France too.

As well as Greece, Italy, South Korea, Mexico, and a couple others: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Countries-with-a-Fix...

Same in The Netherlands: https://wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0017452/2021-07-01/0

I really don‘t like Buchpreisbindung. It frequently makes books significantly more expensive than their English originals (I‘ve seen prices 10€ higher than the English version). That’s the primary reason why I choose to buy the original English versions instead (Buchpreisbindung does not affect non-German books as long as they are not specifically targeting the German markets like educational materials). A nice side effect is the noticeable improvement tin my comprehension skills for English texts.

Can't be bothered to translate this page to English, but from the comments I'm guessing it's the decision by the government to not tax books the same way they do leisure items?

I moved to the Netherlands a while ago, and was shocked at how much books cost. I learned that they're taxed the same as everything else, which seems short-sighted.

For those who don't speak German, this is the English-language article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_book_price

does that apply to used books, or just new? i think (?) the target for this website is used because there is a fixed price for newly published books. (however sometimes big box stores will mark them down or run a sale)

While 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.

I'll second addall. It was a lifesaver during my university years.

Haven't heard of that one, thanks for the info I'll check it out. I do have thriftbooks results listed on the site as well.

Shout out to 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.

That is indeed a nice little microsite. Thanks!

it seems this site breaks when you search for non-English books :/ try "charles fourier", and you will get something like this: "Product Description: "ThÃ©orie des quatre mouvements et des destinÃ©es gÃ©nÃ©rales - Tome I" de Charles Fourier. Philosophe franÃ§ais, fondateur de l'Ãcole sociÃ©taire (1772-1837)."

Yikes, I thought we were past this.

Even if the original text was in some weird encoding... storing the data in Latin-1? Really? In 2022?

Don't worry, that was just the standard French spelling before the 1838 reform.

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.

Booko is fantastic, I just find their service a little lacking outside of Australia.

It 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.

Pretty 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)

I'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.

audiobooks would be a great addition too!

Well, if I search for "Middlemarch" as an ebook, I would expect to get https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/george-eliot/middlemarch :-)

I second the non-Amazon approach. We should make it a point to put our money where our mouth is.

"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.

Thanks for your comment. To address Amazon's supremacy I'm working on a "No Amazon" filter that ignores Amazon and any Amazon subsidiaries.

That is great! Yes, I'd love to see that, thank you.

I 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.

This 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

Anyone with javascript experience should be able to fork this and add niche sites they like with little work.

Thanks for this. An extension is the next major step for this product. Your tool looks really good.

No one wants more extensions

That'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.

I found someone who does, in fact they were just a tiny bit up from your post.

Funny, 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.

What do you look for in a bookstore that makes them more responsible (apart from no Amazon) ?

Not 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.

If 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?

Check out 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.

Sounds like some really cool functionality, I'll take a look and see what I can implement to help people better support local bookstores

That looks great thanks. I should have mentioned I'm in Canada but I'll keep an eye on it.

Trying 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 ...

Sorry 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.

I 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

The 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

Nice 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...

Thanks 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.

Check out https://www.bokfynd.nu/ which does the same for the Swedish book market. This price agent, together with https://www.prisjakt.nu/, are my go-to sites for online purchases.

Bookmarked, 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.

Thanks! 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.

also https://bookfinder.com

There's also https://www.usedbooksearch.net/

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.

What an amazing idea! (I've just submitted a request to have my local library added.)

I 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.

It’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.

Yes bookfinder.com is great. For French books I also like https://www.chasse-aux-livres.fr/ which also search in some local french websites for used books.

I've compared a bunch of book price comparison sites, and AddAll has been consistently the best or second best.

https://www.addall.com/

The 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.

its on the way I promise - depending on your region I'll have it running between 1 week and 1 month from now.

What 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.

I 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.

ahaha 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.

Would be nice to search by ISBN. I tried some titles and didn’t get the right matches

Will take a look at implementing this. Thanks.

I see the problem, I'll have a fix out for this within the next day

Still needs some more tweaking but if you try searching with ISBN now you should see a significant improvement in your results

How about "finding the site that best supports independent booksellers"?

Its disappointing that so much of our society is about cheapest price.

Bookshop.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

Isn't Bookshop.org really just Ingram Content Group?

yeah 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

indiebound does this, here's an example: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780988518391

Good start! Not quite the cheapest, though!

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.

The prices on Pages on Pages include shipping costs, I probably should be more clear about that on the page itself. Thanks :)

Shipping 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.

Really 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.

Guess who owns abebooks now?

This 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.

I'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 :)

Great 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...

Thanks! 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.

You might have to account for toll fees since the price does not represent the final amount of money one has to pay.

Currently it's only accurate in the USA, I'm working on implementing more regions so that it is completely accurate around the world

Wow, 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

Thanks! let me know if you have any feedback or criticisms, I'd be happy to address them for you.

I 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.

ISBN 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.

Looking 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.

Thanks 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.

I 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.

This 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.

Thats great to hear! If you have any ideas or criticisms please let me know I'd be happy to implement them for you.

Nice 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.

I'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.

Its 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.

I 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.

I 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.

Yes, 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.

Abebooks 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.

Pretty helpful! I would probably use this if there was an option for audiobooks.

I'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.

Love 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.

ahaha thank you for the feedback. I'm working on the ISBN functionality as we speak, it'll be live within the next day

ISBN search is now live, let me know what you think :)

I 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.

I'm sorry about that, that seems to be a flaw with their 'Checkout with Paypal' process. Hopefully it all gets resolved for you quickly.

There'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.

This 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!

Thanks 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 :)

I read that book! It's a wonderful adventure, enjoy!

Using my FF with some privacy/adblocking extensions - clicking on every (affiliate) link resulted in a connection failed error. #my2cents

works fine on another browser without extensions - trouble on my end then

Yes 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.

it 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.

Great 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.

You can search for ISBN numbers as well as titles now, hopefully that will help :)

First 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.

Let me know if you have any trouble with the site!

It 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).

It behaves a little strangely if it doesn't receive a full book title. I'm working on improving that.

On your prices, if the amount ends with a 0, you lop it off. So $12.40 becomes 12.4. Dollar prices require two decimals.

Yes 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.

It doesn't ask for location at all, so it should really be called "find a cheap book in the USA".

Yes, this seems a major drawback with it.

It does grab your country from your IP address, while it's currently only optimized for the US because it's brand new, I'll have support for other major regions before the end of next week.

Not working with pi-hole. Some link synergy link. I searched for accelerate in case that's useful.

I'll take a look

Looks 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

uBlock origin immediately warns me when clicking on a book, as it is a ojrq.net url, that is probably dns blocked by pi-hole?

Nice! 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.

I 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.

I 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?

It'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.

Interesting, thanks. I do wonder how much space it would take to cache every bookstore.

I'll let you know in a few weeks

This 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/

I've been using https://www.piranhas.co/ which also featured on HN and provide you with more details about the price comparison.

I 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.

My #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.

It 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.

fwiw 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.

Thanks! 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.

so, 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?

Yes 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.

Yes, I searched a book, saw $14 as the price (“Ouh, that is cheap”), then clicked through to see $14+$26 shipping to Canada :/

Sorry about that. I'll be improving support for Canada before the end of the week.

Could 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).

Great 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

I came here to suggest exactly that filter!

The 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?

>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

Random used books have very little value. My town library just had its annual book sale which comes from some combination of donations over the course of the year and culling its collection. Depending on the day of the sale it was $10-$20 for a paper grocery bag of books. And, yes, there are probably book dealers looking for the odd item that's worth more than that. That's actually a useful market mechanism.

We tend to think of books as something unique but, in general, the cost of connecting your old stuff to someone who might actually want it is often higher than the value of the item. I have a bunch of things that someone would probably pay some amount of money for but the time and effort to list on eBay might net me minimum wage.

> My town library just had its annual book sale which comes from some combination of donations over the course of the year and culling its collection. Depending on the day of the sale it was $10-$20

Yes, library sales are wonderful. Random books at garage sales and library sales are very inexpensive. My question is, what happens to the books at the library sale that are unsold there?

Our information age with everyone wearing and carrying multiple computers is not doing anything to make particular books more affordable to anyone. If you want to buy a particular book, you have a hard time beating the prices that the huge Amazon consortium maintains. The modern technology has taken over and re-shaped the economy to the point where someone who wants to shop from a large selection of books does not even think about trying to walk into a book store, but the efficiencies of Amazon, et al., have not delivered a bounteous improvement in connecting people to stuff over what the mail order operations of Montgomery Ward in the 1890's and Sears in the early 1900's provided. The promised techno-age economy of mass specialization and mass customization is proving elusive.

> That's actually a useful market mechanism.

There is some question about how one can force fit a competitive market model onto what is going on here. The market in particular titles is so thin that it is hardly a market. I can't sell at any price titles that I can buy on-line at $35 or $50. What makes the odd item worth more? The odd sale at $100 or $150 every few years to the one or few buyers obsessed or wealthy enough to pay that? There may be another possible market equilibrium that our current move-fast-and-break-things system is unable to find, in which twenty times the volume flows at one tenth the price.

>My question is, what happens to the books at the library sale that are unsold there?

The same thing that happens to literally tons of other paper with ink/toner on it. It gets pulped or whatever. I'm not sure how books could have a particular conduit from random item that someone really would prize to that person.

There are computers, and internet, and book sorting machines with up to 8 output bins, and nobody can afford to put together a book and a person who is willing to pay an hour's wages plus shipping and handling?

This 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.

This 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

The 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.

$100 ??

its $30 in Amazon https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RMSHYGG

The $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.

try inputting the full search term - "staff engineer: Leadership beyond the management track" the search can get a little buggy without it

This 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.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll work on adding these filters in should have them running before the end of the week.

Needs a toggle to filter out Amazon owned companies.

Very high on my priority list, will have this done before the end of the week.

I found a site that is even cheaper: https://z-lib.org/

ERR_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 ```

Sorry about that I think my server is struggling a little, I will scale it up right now.

This is great! Helps reduce search time a lot

Thanks! Let me know if you have any feedback or criticisms, I'd be happy to address them.

Really cool, how are you planning to monetize? Have you considered just allowing people to purchase on your site?

Thanks! 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.

I use bigwords.com myself which has been around for a while and has quite a bit more features.

Worked really well. Thanks!

Thanks! Let me know if you have any feedback or criticisms I'd be happy to make improvements.

Not 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/

The 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.

I'm a huge fan of Booko, which has been doing exactly this for years

I love Booko as well, they have a great site. My only issue with them is I find their service slightly lacking when you're outside of Australia.

Thanks for the shout out. First SVN(!) commit was July 2, 2007, making Booko a 15+ year old Rails app.

"... in the US".

I'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.

The website was down for me:( Sounds like a good idea though!

Sorry 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.

Excellent, would it be possible to make it regional?

Yes 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.

Don'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.

this isnt for e-books too right?

At 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.

US only.

Working on other regions, unfortunately I have to do it region by region which slows me down. Should have 3-4 more regions up by the end of the week and I'll be adding about 2 a week afterwards for the next few weeks.

Cool. waiting for India

libgen?

this is more focused on purchasing physical books cheaply

(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?

The 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.

I'm never holding PII at all except when you sign up to email updates

My $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-gener...

Developed 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?

> The law may technically apply, but how enforceable is it against a foreign national with no EU assets?

Q: Shouldn't we all aim a little higher than "this law may well apply but isn't enforceable due to X"?

Searched 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.

Found: $2.50 + $2.00 shipping https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3119792159...

Not sure how to takes shipping into account; but really solid results so far!

Thank you for the feedback! I'll look into it.

It looks like this was happening because the book is too far down the list on that site so the algorithm assumes its unimportant. I'm improving the algorithm now to account for these cases.

this should be popular. people always like to compensate others as minimally as they can.

Well... 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.

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