A sharp financial brain! (bookbrain.co.uk)

Member Name: caro

Product:	bookbrain.co.uk
Date:	19/02/01 (56 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quick way to find best prices

Disadvantages: Not totally comprehensive

Despite its slightly off-putting front page, Bookbrain is an excellent price comparison site devoted to online bookshops. I would thoroughly recommend it both for quality of information and for ease of use.

FRONT PAGE
The front page is rather cluttered, although the site as a whole is reasonably clean and attractive. It features some current best-sellers (these are presumably not updated often: as I write this in February, one commentary refers to a book as a good stocking filler!). The short paragraphs of information are all the information available on featured books: click on the link and you will be taken directly to a price comparison.

Slightly more useful is the “Online Bestsellers” top ten, which does at least bring you up to date on current books. Once again, however, there is no information on the books beyond the price comparison. This lack of editorial is no disadvantage, as more information is readily available elsewhere. It is, perhaps, a pity to have the little there is: a guide to using the search facility could be more useful.

There is little advertising: this is because the site seems to be funded mainly by its ‘premier sponsor’, WH Smith Online. Both they and Waterstones, whom they own, have small adverts on this page. Other pages have small banners for various bookstores (particularly Blackwells).

PRICE COMPARISON
The best way to use this site is to go straight to the book you want to buy. Simply type the title, author, publisher or ISBN to start searching (I’m dubious as to how helpful searching by publisher is!). You can also do an advanced search, combining several fields – this is where the publisher field may come in useful!

Select the exact book you want from the results (unless you search by ISBN number, you will get a short list showing different formats such as paperback and hardback, and more results if several books match your se
arch). You will then be shown its current price at up to 14 different online bookshops (the site claims to have searched 16, but only ever finds books at 14 so I suspect the higher figure is an error). The first price is “available from our premier sponsor WH Smith Online”, but scroll down straightaway to the full list underneath.

The sites covered include: internet bookshop, WH Smith Online, Amazon, BOL, Gillihams, AlphabetStreet, Swotbooks, Country Bookshop, The Book Place, Studentbookworld, Waterstones, Blackwells, Ottakars and Specialist Bookshop. Many of these I have never visited, and I certainly would not check more than a dozen sites myself when buying a book, so Bookbrain finds bargains I would never locate myself.

For each site stocking the book, the list provides first, the name of the bookstore (obviously enough!). Helpfully, the name is often a clickable link not just to the site’s front page, but to that book on that site. This is another real timesaver.

Availability, price of the book and cost of postage and packing are all provided. Search results are listed in order of price inclusive of shipping charges, cheapest first. However, if you are buying several books, read the ‘notes’ column. This provides a useful breakdown of how the site calculates shipping charges: some have no charge, others a flat rate, and yet others charge a fixed amount plus a further amount per book. These mean that you may need to mentally adjust the results if you are buying more than one book. If you’re buying enough books to make postage prices fairly academic, click on ‘price’ and the results will be resorted on book price alone.

The search is fast. The site says ‘up to 30 seconds’, but for me it is generally quicker (I use a 56.6K modem).

I buy a large range of books, from specialist legal theory to current bestsellers. The former titles sometimes
won’t be found, but there are few bargains to be had in any event! For more popular books (and even some relatively obscure ones), Bookbrain can save me a lot of money. The results are particularly dramatic when a site is having a special sale on some books: I saved £8 on one hardback bestseller.

Of course, Bookbrain is not perfect: it does not search every online bookstore (and would presumably become totally unwieldy if it did). For appropriate books, I therefore still check sites such as thebookpeople.com separately, as they have a limited range but excellent prices. However, with that exception, Bookbrain is my first port of call when buying books online.

Finally, Bookbrain says that it is developing more features. It is unclear what these are, but register with them and they will email you with details! In the meantime, they are limited to a ‘recommend a friend’ email facility and a contact page to email Bookbrain.

Summary: