| Product: |
bookkoob.co.uk |
| Date: |
27/10/05 (177 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Quick, easy
Disadvantages: None
I have a habit. Some might call it an addiction. I love shopping but right now I can’t stop buying books. I can’t afford them, but I have to have them. I read fairly fast, but I have more than enough to keep me going for weeks and yet I buy more. In order to feed my addiction without bankrupting myself, I am trying to find bargains in charity shops, on ebay and in the Amazon Marketplace either to read myself or to sell on ebay to raise funds to buy more.
Increasingly the bookkoob.co.uk website is informing my decisions. It price-checks a range of stores before returning all the prices of the books, the price including postage and packaging, with the best price (for the book and P&P) at the top of the list. This then allows me to compare the best price with the Amazon Marketplace offers and ebay so I can tell if the book I’m interested in is a bargain or overpriced. It is also handy because sometimes the Amazon price is cheaper, but it's only the P&P that makes it look more expensive. When you take into account you can get free P&P for orders over £15, Amazon may well be the best buy afterall. It doesn't take into account these special postage deals, so you do need to be aware of that.
There is very little information available about the origins of bookkoob.co.uk. They mention working in association with Amazon, and the other leading book retailers (who don’t get a name check) and their programme that does the price checking – Fred.
’Fred’ only takes a few seconds to search the stores and searching is really easy. Just type in the title or the author on the homepage and you’re away. It tells you whether or not the book is in stock, when it is normally dispatched and provides you with the links you need to the stores to go ahead and make your purchase.
There is also an advanced search option, which I have not had the need to use yet. The advanced search allows you search on ISBN number or keywords relating to the title, author, format, subject or publisher.
The site even provides short user reviews (these have actually been sourced from the Amazon site). You can also compare the prices of American and French online bookstores (although it looks like it only price checks 2 French stores and the American site isn’t as snazzy as the British or French ones).
The UK online bookstores that are compared are:
DVD.co.uk
Play.com
The Hut
The Book Place
WH Smith
Swotbooks
Amazon UK
BookFellas
History Bookshop
Country Bookshop
Virgin Books
Pick a Book
Student Bookworld
Tesco Books
Another Bookshop
Computer Books
BOL
Blackwells
The site also contains a subject directory. Included in the list items are: biographies, business, children’s, fiction, science fiction, sports… The list goes on and on. When you click on one of the links you are taken to the best sellers for that particular category. This is ideal for people who like a particular genre and want to find other books to enjoy. I haven’t needed to use it however as my reading list just gets bigger and bigger through other sources.
If you know a book's ISBN number, you can put a link on your website to the bookkoob page that will give you the prices (although I’m not sure why you would want to, unless you were the author of the book). All you webmasters need to do is put the ISBN number after the final slash of the bookkoob URL in your anchor tag. The example given is: <a href='http://www.bookkoob.co.uk/0330258648'>Com pare Prices with BookkooB</a>
A recent addition to the site is the “bookmarklet”. This is some code that you can download to your computer, by adding it to your favourites. Once the page is added to your favourites, any time you come across a book when you are online, and the ISBN number is included in the page, you can click on the favourites link you saved and it will search the page for the ISBN number, open a new window and take you off to compare prices for that book (as long as the ISBN number is valid). If there is more than one ISBN number on a page, the first five will be used. This seems to indicate that 5 pop-up windows will be generated, and one of the windows will have the details you were after. This isn’t very good, but on the other hand, very few sites have pages containing more than one ISBN number on each page!
Summary
It’s a simple, friendly, clean, easy to use site that is fast and logical. The search facility isn’t that clever though, so make sure you type the title/author of the book accurately or you won’t get any search results (or at very least the wrong ones). It isn’t smart enough to realise when you have made a type and helpfully suggest “did you mean…”
I’ve found the site invaluable and have even bought a few books from Play.com by linking through from this site. Perhaps I can buy a book about being obsessed with buying books.... I'm going to go see!
Summary: Excellent!
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Last comments:
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- 30/10/05 I listed the stores that are checked in my review. The search engine won't be able to deal with sites who don't make their data available to it in some way and so it won't be able to pick up a random book posted on a random website.
Human s are fallible. Computers are built by humans. There is no way the internet is infallible! This site does not profess to be able to find the best price on the www for a particular book in the same way as it can't tell you the book you have on sale can actually be found in the local Oxfam for 50p! |
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- 30/10/05 Aha! But - it seems they only show those other sites which must be 'registered' with them (or somethng!) Just as an exercise, I entered the title & author of a book I am selling on a website called listbooks and listbooks don't show up on bookkoob.co.uk. I'm selling my copy of this particular book for £2.50 with 94p p & p, yet on bookkoob.co.uk the cheapest was around £5 before postage! Just shows you, you think the internet is infallible....! Good review, nevertheless! Lou x |
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- 30/10/05 I'm the author of BookkooB and I just wanted to saw thank you for such a great review, far better than I could write! You seem to have pretty well found all the features of the site and reported them accurately.
On e minor correction, the site does calculate special postage rules, like Amazon's free delivery on orders over £15. There is also a 'comparison cart', linked to just below each book's price details, that you can use if you a looking to purchase more than one item. This cart will show you if you would be better off combining your order from one store or splitting it between more than one. BookkooB is the only site that has this feature.
I’m currently looking at the feasibility of including the Amazon Marketplace and Abebooks’ prices onto the site and will add eBay to the list.
If anyone has any questions, or suggestions on how the site could be improved, the feedback form on the site (bottom right of most pages) is the best way to contact me.
Thank you again for the review. |
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