This is an interview with Eugene Aronsky, one of the founders of We Compare Books, at WSOU, Seton Hall University‘s pirate radio. This interview aired on September 6, 2008.  In this interview Eugene talks about his motivation behind starting www.wecomparebooks.com, and discusses some of the basics behind how the site works.

This is a pretty interesting question, and the answer can be applied to any type of site that claims to compare prices. After all, all sites that successfully compare prices have to work on the same basic principle, if they do not, then they do not really work.

Every book aimed for large scale distribution is printed hundreds of thousands, or even millions of times. In each printing (or edition), a book is marked with a number, an ISBN. This is either a 10 or 13 digits number that identifies this book, and that can then be used to search for this book in databases, or to compare the price of book “A” with book “B” and you can be sure that if two books have the same ISBN than they are the same book. So the best way to make sure you are buying the good book is by verifying its ISBN.

It is at this point that we come in. In the past it was difficult to compare prices because you had to go from store to store, but the Internet has allowed for increased transparency, putting power into the hands of the smart consumer. Of course, the seller or store needs some kind of online presence and an online catalog of books for search engines to work.

Given that books are sold at different websites by different sellers at different prices the book price comparison engine searches through the largest bookstores on the web, to find you the best deal on the book you want. There are two steps involved in this: the search and the comparison.

The search is exactly what it sounds like. A request is sent to each and every bookstore for books that match the search criteria entered by the user. Let’s say you want a book on “statistical business analysis”. A request is sent to bookstores to give a list of “statistical business analysis”, or with “statistical business analysis” as the subject. Every bookstore then returns a list of books (or none if none is found). The search engine will then order these results according to an algorithm; for example a book titled “The analysis of quarterly results’ statistical data – Business” will be lower in the list than a book titled “Statistical Business Analysis applied to real-life scenarios” because the second book’s title matches exactly the search criteria. Once sorted, the results are displayed to the user.

Once the user picks a book to get the best prices for it, the second step, the comparison, begins. A request is sent to all bookstores for the current price, availability and shipping price for a given book. The results are then sorted according to total price and the result is displayed to the users.

So why are there so many different book price comparison websites? The difference is in the details. Some might be very fast, but they search and compare using internal databases instead of live data, something that might turn out to be a problem. Indeed, since the price and availability of books sometimes fluctuate wildly, using information a few days, or even a week old, might mean inaccurate results. You should always use engines that fetch live data as it is guaranteed to be the most accurate; it is true they are a bit slower but waiting those few seconds more might save you a lot of trouble.

Other search engines will display a lot of details when what you really want is the book. At We Compare Books we aim at simplicity. Just search for a book, click on it to compare prices and you are ready to buy it. Three mouse clicks is all you need to find the best price.

An example of result you get with We Compare Book

If the user would like to see all prices for bookstores that currently have the book, simply clicking on the “Check full comparison report” link will bring up a list of all bookstores and their price for the book. Sometimes you might want to buy from a particular bookstore for a variety of reasons; by looking at the list you can quickly decide if it’s more important to buy from that bookstore or to buy for the lowest priced one.

First of all, please let me congratulate you on having made it this far. Starting a new semester is always hard, and having made it this far you’ve gotten past the hardest part.

At this point you should be feeling pretty good, you were able to afford all of your books, and the semester isn’t as bad as you thought it was going to be, now what? Well, I know that you probably do not want to hear this, but this is the best time to purchase books for next semester. The fact is that right now there is almost no competition, and you can get some really great deals.

The first thing that you should do is look at what courses you still need to take, see the ones offered next semester, and see what books are required for those courses. If you feel confident that the same professor will be teaching these courses in the fall – hint: if it is a full time professor who has taught this course for the past few years chances are that they will also teach this course next semester), and if this is a non-technical class (history, literature, English, research, etc. -  then you can assume relatively safely that next semester this same professor will be teaching this same class. This means it is likely the same book will be used. Why? Simply because professors tend to use and reuse their syllabus for years, and by changing the book they have to do more work on a new syllabus, so they stick with the same textbook.

So, if you buy your textbooks for the next semester at midway during the current one, you will save a bundle; don’t forget to compare prices before you buy!

Everyone knows that college students must read the equivalent of several books every year. Depending on your major your mandatory reading might amount to more than 50 books a year. How can you keep your eyes (and your brain!) in working order and still retain all the information you need to succeed in your classes?

If you are not lucky enough to read faster than the average person than that means you read about 100-200 words per minute. This is not a lot, considering a book can contain more than 100,000 words (~400 pages). This means it will take the average person 500 minutes (or a little over 8 hours) to finish that book. And that is simply the time required to scan the pages with your eyes with a minimum of information retention and without caution for your eyes. Eyestrain will appear in as little as 20 minutes of continuous reading. This means that if you plan to read for an extended period of time, you should takes breaks for your eyes every half hour or so.

This article describes eyestrain that occurs while reading and ways to prevent it. Although it is primarily intended for parents looking to help their children read longer, most if not all of the tips included apply to college and graduate students. By increasing your reading sessions you will decrease the time required to read a given piece but you will not necessarily have a better understanding of what you read. Many methods exist to help with information retention; one such method is the SQ3R (or SQRRR). Other methods are freely available over the Internet.

In short, when planning a long study session, prepare yourself, your environment and don’t hesitate to take short breaks.  Your general health will affect how you read, how much you can read, and how well you understand it. Read technical or hard to understand material differently than you would read a novel: take notes, ask yourself questions, look up words that you don’t understand right away.