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

pagesonpages.com

121–130 of 303 posts

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

#121

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.

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

#125
post #122

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.

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

#126

"... 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.

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

#127
post #98

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.

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

#129

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…

>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.

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