System 13

I received an email from a lady named Lucy earlier, webmaster of booksprice.com. She wanted to let me know that they’ve just launched a redesigned version of their site. The site let’s you find the best prices on books, either used or new. Simply type in the book’s title, the author, or an ISBN, and you’ll get a list of possible results back. Click on “compare price”, and you get a screen like this, with the best prices at the top. You can have it figure in shipping as well:

The price results page has links to all of the sites to purchase the book.

You can also add a bunch of books to your cart, and then get a combined price check. This basically finds the site where you can buy all of the books together, for the cheapest price. It’s a pretty nifty feature if you’re looking for the best deal on that set of books about ancient Oriental edible weeds that your weird little cousin has been wanting for the past few years.

One of the few complaints I have with the site though is that it isn’t fluid in width, and the main content goes well beyond the right side of my browser when using 800×600 resolution. I know that most folks have moved up past 800×600, but isn’t it still the standard to design by? Oh well. Minor annoyance, especially when you consider that the search box is clearly visible without scrolling at all, and that is after all the main point of the site.

Just a bit of disclosure here (full disclosure, in fact): Lucy asked that I blog about their newly redesigned service, to let my bookish readers know about it. Whether I did or didn’t blog about it, as compensation for my time, they offered to send me a free book, either Snow or My name is Red by Orhan Pamuk. After reading the reviews and checking out the overviews of them, I opted for the latter. I appreciate the gift, but I’d like to point out that it didn’t change how this blog post came out. If I thought the service sucked, I’d say as much. As it is, though, I like the service, and will most likely be using it in the future. Maybe I’ll be the one buying up the cheapest copies of those books about edible ancient Chinese weeds. So, there you have it. I am fully disclosed, or some such.