BookFinder.com Journal

Alibris and AbeBooks coupons available on BookFinder.com

Some good news for students looking for cheap textbooks or book lovers wanting to pick up the books they never received for Christmas.  Both Alibris and AbeBooks are offering users of BookFinder.com a coupon for orders over a certain value.

Until February 5th 2012 orders on Alibris.com from BookFinder.com are eligible for $2 off an order of $20 or more, $4 off $40, $7 off $70, $10 off $100 and $30 off $300 and up.

Until January 19th, 2012 books bought on AbeBooks.com from BookFinder.com are eligible for $4 off an order of $40 or more, $5 off $50 or more and $6 off $60 or more.

Start searching now:  Just remember to make note of the coupon code we display for you in your search results and apply it to your purchase on Alibris or AbeBooks.  The code will be displayed on relevant searches like so:

 

 

BookFinder.com is hiring

Do you love technology? Do you love books? Do you have great interpersonal and communication skills? Do you live to build and support great software teams? Do you thrive in a fast paced e-commerce environment? If the answer is yes please read on.

If you are a software engineer and want to live in the Pacific Northwest BookFinder.com is currently looking for two positions.  1) Software Engineering Manager and 2) an experienced Software Engineer to be a part of a small agile team in our Vancouver B.C. office

If you are interested take a look at the job postings which are located on our parent company’s website.  All of the qualifications and contact details are listed there however please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have about the positions.  We hope to hear from you.

[Now Reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald]

BookFinder.com en Espanol

BookFinder.com está ahora disponible en español. Para ver la traducción al español, simplemente haga clic en "Ver BookFinder.com en: Español" en nuestro sitio web, tal como se muestra en la imagen siguiente.

We are very happy to announce that we have now launched a complete Spanish translation of our website.  We have long search the Spanish catalogues of various booksellers but until now users had to navigate our website in Dutch, English, French, or German.

If you are most comfortable with Spanish, just to “View BookFinder.com in: Español” on our homepage below the search box (seen below)

End of the Survey, and the 403 errors

I just wanted say thank you to everyone who completed the BookFinder.com survey.  I'll be closing it up in a couple minutes and then going over all the input and suggestions that you gave us, and at a first glance it looks like we have some really good feedback.

Your input is extremely helpful when considering new ideas, and as such we really appreciate everyone who took a couple minutes out of their day to offer their opinions.  So thank you.

In other news, I think we finally tracked down the problem that was causing some users to randomly receive 403/404 errors that were blocking access to our search.  With the help of a couple VERY helpful BookFinder.com users we were able to finally replicate the problem ourselves and last week we worked out a fix.  Since then we have been monitoring the results and it seems as if we have fixed it. 

This was very frustrating for us since we knew users were having problems but we could never replicate the issue on our side, which made finding the root cause quite difficult.  So again I would like to say thank you to all the BookFinder.com users who contacted us and provided valuable information that helped us find this problem and solve it.

If you are still having problems, or ever have problems please do send us an email to let us know about any bugs on our site.

[Now Reading: Foundation and Empire by Issac Asimov]

Survey: What kind of books do you read?

Once again we are trying to develop new ways to better serve you, the local BookFinder.com user, as well as any other book buyers on the internet who have not yet heard of us.  I suppose sounds rather simple but because not everyone is looking for the same kinds of books (signed first editions vs cheap reading copies vs textbooks) we have to be careful to consider everyone.  This is where you come in.

Please take our survey and tell us what kind of books you read, and how we can make BookFinder.com better for you!

The survey is only six questions long, should only take about 1-2 minutes, and is completely anonymous.

Thanks in advance for your help!

-Scott & The BookFinder.com team

Having Trouble with BookFinder.com?

A few of you have mentioned to us that you have been experiencing problems with connecting to BookFinder.com in the past week.  Some people have experienced 404 Errors and 403 Errors when viewing different BookFinder.com pages. 

Thank you for pointing out these issues, because of your messages we are aware of what is happening and are working on a solution to fix the problem completely.

In most cases the errors are intermittent, and if you do happen to experience a 404 or 403 error on a BookFinder.com page, please try refreshing the page (ctrl + F5).  In many cases a simple refresh will bring up the correct page.  There are cases, however, where the error persists.

If you continue to have issues connecting to the site we apologize and ask for your continued patience as we fix this issue.

Sincerely

The BookFinder.com Team

BookFinder.com now running on EC2

As a BookFinder.com user you probably didn’t even notice but last week we just picked up and moved servers.  For several years we were running our servers from around BookFinder.com’s birthplace of Berkeley, CA but last week we packed up our bytes and moved our digital home.   Now we are happy to announce that we are up and running on the Elastic Compute Cloud, which is a cloud computing platform developed by Amazon.  Charlie and Bryan (our dynamic programming duo) are very excited about this change, since not only is cloud computing a cutting edge technology but it should also provide BookFinder.com with a flexibility and scalability that we have never previously had.

So if you are like me the question you are probably asking yourself right now is, “so what does this mean for me?” and the non-technical short answer is “very little.”  Our search functions will remain the same, and while we may run a little faster now the look and feel of BookFinder.com will stay the same.  The real benefit of this change is behind the scenes here.  Kind of selfish I know but, I think we deserve it =).

Hopefully now we can get back to trying to add new bookstores and additional services that will help you book buyers find the books that you need and love!

[Now Reading: Prelude to Foundation by Issac Asimov]

Finding a book when you don't know the title or author

Every now and then we get emails, or comments on the blog, from people who are trying to remember a book title based on fragments of information about: the story, characters, or cover.  Often it's a book from their childhood and they can only remember a few details.  If you have been in this situation it is very frustrating but all hope is not lost. I've got a few tips for you.

BookFinder.com
To start I'm going to assume that you have already tried plugging the info you know into BookFinder.com, this is one of the instances where keyword search is useful.  Author and title are more accurate but keyword is a bit more of a catch all. 

This is great if you can remember a bit of the title, or another key detail but when all you can remember is that "there's this cute puppy that’s lost his mittens, and the story is set at Christmas" a little more help is in order.

Rely on the kindness of strangers:
Several of our bookselling partners have areas of their websites dedicated to this exact problem.  AbeBooks BookSleuth, Amazon's Askville, and Barnes & Noble Book Clubs: Lost Books are all good places to start.  These are simple forums where other users play name that book.  AbeBooks also has a similar feature called GiftSleuth where you can enter likes and dislikes of friends and family and readers can all blurt out book suggestions which they think might be appropriate for future birthdays and what not. This however is a different kettle of fish.

Internet Search Engine:
If you happen to know a detail that is unique about the book: a quote, a main characters name, or a key detail you can plug this information into your favourite search engine and could possibly be rewarded.  Since Google started scanning books this has become even more powerful.  You can also do a similar type of search on Amazon itself.

Seek professional help:
When in doubt seek professional help, and by this I mean you local independent bookseller.  Booksellers hang around thousands of books every day for years on end and in doing so they tend to pick up a few tidbits here and there.  Depending on how much you actually remember about the book (and the booksellers specialty) these literary angels can often pull off miraculous feats; librarians, also VERY helpful.

If anyone else has some good tips feel free to post them in the comments section and I will try and add some more to this post as we come up with other good ideas.

Happy hunting.

BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin

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.

Anirvan: saying goodbye

I've been working on BookFinder.com for almost 13 years now, but even the most amazing experiences come to an end. I'll be exiting BookFinder.com in August, heading out on the very best of terms, and after years of planning to ensure that our users aren't impacted by the transition.

BookFinder.com started off as my class project in 1996. My best friend Charlie built the 486 computer that it ran on, and we teamed up in 1999 to rewrite the software and run the site as our small business. We've been together every step of the way, designing, building, and managing BookFinder.com (and debating books and politics over lunch every day). I'm delighted to be able to pass my role on to him; the site's in incredibly good hands.

I've been planning to step back for several years now, to work on other projects, travel, and explore new opportunities. Please stay in touch:

• via my homepage and weblog
• via email, to anirvan (at) chatterjee (dot) net

I'm deeply grateful to the bibliophiles, booksellers, and marketplace operators I've worked with over the years. I've heard some pretty amazing stories, and I always promised myself that when I had some time, I'd try to collect and share them with others.

That's why I'm launching the Online Bookselling History Project, an effort to collect first-hand accounts of the online bookselling trade before 2000. If you were involved with the trade pre-2000, then I want your stories: bookseller BBSes, UIEE conversion nightmares, changing cataloging practices, the bricks vs. clicks debates, etc. You can help put together a patchwork history of our trade during a time of great transition. More on this soon.

— Anirvan Chatterjee

P.S. Thank you to everyone who's been part of BookFinder.com since 1996 -- Alison, Asok, Barbara, Boris, Bryan, Chaitee, Charlie, Christine, David, Fredrik, Garner, Giovanni, Hannes, Scott, Shaku, Shauna, Thomas, Tushar, Vanessa, and Wendy. I'm lucky to have friends like you.

[Now Reading: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh]