Some Book-related Resources on the Web

[Last Update: July 31, 2005]

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Some Useful Book-related Resources On the Web

Amazon is pretty good, with their “used book” listings, and their “free shipping over $25 is useful as well. But still, if you like rooting for the independent bookstores, and want to spread your wealth around, there are whole worlds waiting for us out there. Some good sources for used and rare books are

American Book Exchange (ABEBooks), my hands down favorite and first stop for book shopping, is a large network of independent booksellers (mainly US-based, but some international as well)—by far the most comprehensive source of used and near-new books that I’ve found. Its only mildly irksome that one can’t save search results except in the Shopping Cart:

http://www.abebooks.com/

Chambal.com provides a price comparison service for books across major online book sellers in real time. Other services provided are: Rare Book Search; Audio Book Search (We will be adding e-books also shortly); Searching prices from e-bay; Spelling suggestions to users when they key in wrong spellings; Search by both UPC code (13 digit) and ISBN (10 digit); Search for multiple versions / releases of same title.

http://www.chambal.com/

Bibliofind:

http://www.bibliofind.com

Bookfinder4U, a “young and promising meta-search engine” that has separate searches for contemporary books and for rare and out-of-print books—one good feature is that, in at least some of the Search Result views, it shows all costs up front, rather than making you go through the purchase process to compare shipping costs:

http://www.bookfinder4u.com/book_find_advanced_search.htm

FetchBook.info is another resource that provides a search facility for over 100 bookstores.

http://www.fetchbook.info/

· Biblio is billed as “the preferred source for used books, out-of-print books, and rare books, with over 12 million titles offered for sale by over 2100 booksellers and bookstores worldwide.”

http://www.biblio.com/

· Booksprice searches 33 bookstores, as yet another option

http://www.booksprice.com/

To track down specific book stores, or by location, try:

The American Booksellers Association maintains this web site. Browse a list of over 2,200 Booksellers, complete with URLs, email addresses and descriptions. Easily track down bookstores in your corner of the world. Maybe you're looking for a bookstore that has books on Asia, or carries USGS maps? Search thousands of bookstore descriptions, or search by postal code to find bookstores in your neighborhood.

http://www.bookweb.org/bookstores/

Two sources for deep-discount books (usually new, overstocks, etc.) are

Daedalus Books

http://www.daedalus-books.com:80 /

Hamilton Books

http://www.hamiltonbook.com/subject.html

One great source of information on bookstores (morphological, not virtual) is a set of annotated lists (by country, region, and sometimes by city, e.g., LA, NY, SF) maintained by Evelyn Leeper at

http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper/bookshop.htm

A good sources of information on web-based book resources and on virtual book stores are

The BookWire Index

http://www.bookwire.com/index.html

One wide-ranging but rich source of information (designed for librarians interested in web-based resources for Acquisitions and Collections) is

AcqWeb

http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/law/acqs/acqs.html

Some Other Book Store Links

ABE: Search

A great collection of independent booksellers – mainly in the USA, but some international as well. (Buy cheap, and vote for a post-corporate future as well…!)

Bibliofind

BookFinder.com

Search for New, Out of Print and Used Books

An experimental “all-in-one” book finder page

(I have not tried this, so caveat emptor)

Amazon.com: Search

BookWire: Index

Hamilton Books: Subject List

Leeper's Book Stores Lists

Los Angeles Area Bookstores

Albatross Books (nature)

Alibris