271–280 of 303 posts
I guess Amazon, for all its faults, has a few things going for it.
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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?
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 g…
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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 Amazo…
>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,…
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.
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.
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>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,…
> 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…
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.
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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/
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, fo…
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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 Amer…
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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…