BookFinder.com Journal

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]

Why I love used books - reason #407

People who get to know me know that I love reading, and I also love music, and my favourite place to shop for either is at a shop with used merchandise.  One thing I often wonder while looking though the stacks is "what made someone buy this."  Sometimes it's because the work in question is, in my opinion, awful to the point of hilarity but other times I just wonder what was going on in the previous owner’s life when they decided to buy, or sell, this gem.

On that note I saw this on the BookFinder.com insider list yesterday and I thought I would share it, Bruce from Double-B-Books wrote that while cataloguing a stack of books which had just come into his shop he found the following note that the former owner had written:

"I bought this book from the dusty shelves of an old second hand bookshop in Westgate St., Gloucester.... after dropping my mother and sister at the hospital. They were going to visit my dying father. I walked into the old roman town with my fiance and purchased the book along with a copy of Ruskin's 'The Stones of Venice V.1' and returned to the hospital with the books. My father had died shortly after they had arrived, exactly the time I was in the bookshop. I therefor (sic) bought this book at exactly the time my father took his last desperate breath and discarded his life."

I cannot think of another "thing" which people form such a close personal bond with, other than books.  I too have found notes like this, none as powerful mind you, but I think this is why I feel that a good used book store is so irreplaceable.  When you walk in, not only are you face to face with repository of knowledge and entertainment but at any moment you can stumble upon a small window into the life of a complete stranger who had something in common with you. 

It's definitely nothing I have ever experienced with a record sleeve.

[Now Reading: City of Thieves by David Benioff]

BookFinder.com back on track

I just wanted to post a short apology to anyone who was trying to access BookFinder.com this afternoon.  We had a small server problem and as such some of you may have had your searches go to error earlier today. 

The problem is fixed now and everything is once again running smoothly, so if you did have issues this afternoon you can now perform the search anytime.

Thanks for your patience.

The Limricktionary

Well I am taking holidays off blogging and won't be posting here again until the new year.  So for your amusement over the holidays feel free to play around with The Limricktionary - a must for word nerds everywhere.

Just pick the word you want defined and you shall be returned with a definition in limerick form.

The word Christmas is over-defined,
So I hope, my dear friends, you won't mind
If I state, without fear,
That its true meaning's clear:
Peace on Earth and goodwill to mankind!

The boys at St. Luke's made a fuss
As Abraham boarded the bus.
"He gets Chanukah fun
For eight nights from night one.
What a shame there's no presents for us!"

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

BookFinder.com, same great search, now 60% faster!

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.

LibraryThing price comparison powered by BookFinder.com

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!

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]

Books as a social pursuit

It came to my attention that I have been neglecting those of you who who have absolutely no desire to learn about ereaders so today I promise this is the last you will hear about them from me.  Today instead I thought I would share two articles about reading and how it can effect your social life. 

If you belong to a book club you may be happy to learn that and an an increasing number of authors are jobbing their way around various book clubs to discuss, with their readers, what they thought of the novel.  I think it might take away from the whole book club process if you bring the author in right away but after a discussion about the book, getting to actually ask the author questions about the text could be a really neat experience, and a good reason to read and coming authors. 

From The Daily Beast:

There is a thing authors do, nervously, when they think no one is looking. They check out their numbers—online sales figures, ratings, rankings, reader reviews. Not long ago, Joshua Henkin, a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence and Brooklyn College, was doing just such a thing in his home office. He was scrolling through Goodreads.com, monitoring the reception of his new novel, Matrimony. A user named Shelley had given him a mixed review—three stars out of five. Henkin clicked on her name and decided to email her, offering to attend her book club, if she had one. She did—that very evening—and, after several exchanges, Henkin was set to call into it.

And then moving from from friends recommending a good book, to books recommending a good friend.  LibraryThing.com and the aforementioned Goodreads.com have shown that this works pretty well but The Guardian thinks that relationships based on books should stay at the friend level.  The British paper takes a pot shot, in a fairly amusing article, at Boarders launching its dating service for bibliophiles suggesting that looking for love based on reading tastes can only lead to heartache. 

Oh, the first couple of dates would go fine: you'd huddle over coffees or beers, discussing with animated, shining eyes your love of, say, Haruki Murakami. Then, as things progress, you might go for a weekend away, perhaps walking hand-in-hand down the narrow streets of Hay-on-Wye. Reclining by a roaring fire in a country pub, something like pride would flutter in your breast as you watch the way your new love's lips move slightly as they read. Then the rot would set in. "You thought Wind-Up Bird Chronicle meant what?" "Actually, I did discover Murakami three years before you." "Yes, but I read Norwegian Wood in the original Japanese …"

And before things started to go publicly, horribly, harrowingly wrong, imagine how dull a couple who were both into the same books would be. You might just about put up with your friend's constant evangelising about Patricia Cornwell, but what if she turned up with a new beau who spouted the same hero-worship? And what if our couple were to take the plunge and move in together? Does any home really need two copies of everything on their bookshelf? Whose editions get sent to the charity shop?

The thin line between in and out-of-print

Earlier this week the LA Times printed a story about four Martin Luther King Jr. books which are slated to be brought back into print in time for the celebration of what would have been King's 80th birthday (Jan. 18th, 2010). 

[Beacon Press] will release new editions of "Stride Toward Freedom," first published in 1958, King's memoir of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956; "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?," first published in 1967; "Trumpet of Conscience," first published in 1968; and "Strength to Love," first published in 1963, a volume of his most well-known homilies and the book in the civil rights leader's briefcase when he was killed on April 4, 1968.

This sort of thing happens all the time, books that have been all but forgotten are rejuvenated with a new print run allowing new generations to enjoy them.  Most of the time I hardly give this a second thought since it happens so often however this week I have been spending a lot of time looking at books on the verge of the in/out-of print boarder line.

I have been allocating all my spare time to research for the annual BookFinder.com Report - which lists the most sought after out-of-print books in the US, and more often than not these are the books that are right on this line.  Last year a number of books on our list were brought back into print due to the surge in popularity and I think we might see a few more this year.

When finished list is always interesting to read but for every book that makes it onto the list there are a number of books which just fail to meet our criteria because they are brought back from the out-of-print abyss just as interest in its out-of-print counterpart starts to increase.

One such book is the autobiography of moonshiner Popcorn Sutton titled Me and my Likker.  A local legend in Tennessee as a distiller he wrote the book in 1999 only to have it fall out-of-print for ten years until this past March when Bent Corner Books, a Knoxville bookstore, republished the work after Mr. Sutton's passing.  It is still amazingly hard to find, but it is back in print.

If I get the time I might try and compile a blog post with a few more of these near-misses but in the mean time I have to get back to the report.

[Now reading: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre]

Bibliophibians

Something I've been meaning to share for a long time is this Wondermark comic about the role of books.

So, are you a bibliophibian?