In an effort to escape from the ever present bad news that seems to be the cornerstone of our current civilization I have spent much time recently watching old movies, and reading good books.

The desire that I feel to escape to a “happier time” is understandable, after all, we are living in an unstable world, where no one knows what the next shoe that will drop will be. Oddly enough, instead of turning to fantasy or other such genres I find greater comfort in books that mimic reality, reading about the extremes of what could be possible, but thankfully what has not yet occurred.

One such book is “Death Wave” by Stephen Kahn. This book provides an excellent analysis into much of what is currently happening in our world – in terms of the financial crisis.

From the book cover:

“In the midst of a financial crisis one man must save the world with the aid of a maniacal serial killer, his dead hamster, and a homeless bum named “Troll”.

Stewart is a young man trying to keep it together during the worst financial crisis since the great depression. The corrupt politics and corporate scandals…”

If you want to read more about this book, or listen to free excerpts from the audio book, please go to http://www.kafilmworks.com/deathwave/contents

So you have found the book you are looking for. You have used a good book price comparison website and you are ready to buy your book. Or so you think. Do not rush to buy that book even though you have the lowest price on the planet. First, broaden your search.

What does broaden your search mean? It means start searching with the title and try to find different editions. Sometimes a book’s content – not only textbooks but most commonly novels – does not change between editions yet the newer editions are priced higher. This is simply due to inflation. If several years go by between two editions then the basic book price for a book type (paperback, hard cover, etc.) will have risen. However you do not have to pay simply because a new edition is out. Just broaden your search and look for earlier editions. Try searching with parts of the title or under the author’s name. Try searching through more results, sometimes the results that are relevant to you are hidden lower in the results’s list. When you have found more than one edition of the book you are looking for, you can compare the prices for each edition, using the ISBN. This way you can be sure you are buying the lowest priced one and still get exactly what you want.

Getting cheap textbooks for summer classes is an especially unique challenge.  This is because of the duration of summer classes.  A normal class that you might take in the fall or spring semester lasts about 4 and half months, and most of the time the first week is spent on the introduction.  This means that if you were to not think ahead, and order your textbooks online on the first day of class, you would get them in time for your first, or second assignment (and if you were to plan ahead, contact your professor before hand, or ask another student, then…)

Summer classes, on the other hand work differently.  Most summer classes last 4 weeks, although some may last 6, and you typically have class 5 times a week, with assignments from day one.  Given this short duration it becomes difficult, if not impossible to order a textbook online and wait for regular delivery, and no one wants to pay for overnight shipping.  In this case most students end up going to the bookstore and paying full price for the textbooks.

The solution to this problem is one that is quite simple, but one that few students think of – plan ahead.  Summer classes are rarely a last minute thing, therefore, the same day that you register for a summer class contact the professor (email usually works best) and find out what the required books are, and order them 2 weeks before the start of class, this way you can be sure that you will receive the books in time for class.

Planning ahead and ordering your books online before the start of class has another advantage, and will help ensure that you are getting the absolute lowest price.  Towards the end of every semester students start to sell their textbooks online; given the increase in supply and the fact that demand for textbooks typically peaks after a course starts, this is the optimum time for you to get the best prices on textbooks! And the best way for you to ensure that you are getting the best price on new/used textbooks is to use a textbook price comparison site such as We Compare Books

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.