We at We Compare Books are always looking for new and innovative ways to help our users find cheap books
. To this end, we are proud to announce the addition of categories to our search!
From this point forward all full comparison results will contain categories in which the book you want fits. If you wish to browse other books in that category, or find a cheaper book on the same topic, you can click on the category and a complete list of books in that category will appear for you to choose from.
We believe that this addition will further help you find cheaper books.
If you have any suggestions for future updates to the site, or if you want to share with us your thoughts on this most recent update, please leave a comment in the comments section of this blog post.

In the effort to make this blog more accessable to everyone, we are proud to announce that from now on you will be able to access this blog directly from the main We Compare Books page at http://www.wecomparebooks.com/blog.

Also we invite you to email us directly with any comments, suggestions for blog enteries, or any other ideas related to books that you may have.

We are proud to announce that as of early this week we have added CourseSmart as one of the sites that we are comparing in order to get you the lowest prices on books.  CourseSmart is a leading provider of E-books, and allows users to purchase many popular textbooks in e-book format and download them instantly.

One of the benefits that the Web has brought, in regards to books, is the ease of propagation of E-books.  E-books are, as the name suggests a virtual, digitized representation of a physical book.  This format enables individuals to read the book on a PC or laptop, and often allows users to access the books online with a username and password.

These books are typically offered at a great discount because of the reduced costs of production.  Additionally these books are safer for the environment as no printing or shipping is needed, and they can be distributed digitally.

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.