Re: Amazon developments

Lloyd Wood (L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk)
Fri, 16 Oct 1998 12:50:45 +0100 (BST)


On Thu, 15 Oct 1998, Keith Dawson wrote:

> [ http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/spacesearch/bookbuy/ ]
> >In the interests of easing comparing prices between the various
> >catalogues (but don't forget to add delivery)
>
> Seen this?
>
> http://www.addall.com/

Not until now. (is there an equivalent music service?)

> The site compares a couple dozen online booksellers, adds in
> the delivery, and orders them by total price. I had never heard
> of half the sellers so couldn't say if some of them might be
> European.

Hmmm, a search on 'Carol Lloyd Wood' didn't return the book you'd get
in amazon.com or co.uk, although 'Lloyd Wood' did return that amongst
others (possibly because the book isn't listed as in stock in
amazon.com, whereas it is in amazon.co.uk, so the output is
discarded). Hidden heuristics in metasearch engines always seem to
result in oddities like these - which is why I'd often rather query
online databases myself.

Having said that, selecting delivery to GB returned prices between
US$59 and $US82.90, the cheapest being from the Internet Bookshop UK
(UKP 35.96 - addall converts to US$, but doesn't provide the original
prices in its output even though shipping to the UK was selected) -
whereas amazon.co.uk lists at UKP39.95.

Definitely a useful comparison service. If it does amazon.co.uk and
.de, it's a must-use.

L.

<L.Wood@surrey.ac.uk>PGP<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/>