fetchbook.info

Fetchbook.info is an exact copy of google which should be banned by google.

This website is quite impressive in its presentation and in the databases that they scour. The user interface is polished. Looks very clean. Their strength is in the comparisons of prices from different online booksellers. The major vendors are covered - Amazon, Barnes and Noble and eBay. Plus important though secondary parties like WalMart, Overstock and Buy. At least for Amazon and eBay, I imagine this website's programmers must have availed themselves of the APIs published by those companies. Perhaps for some others, they might have had to resort to screen scraping, which is no fun to code and maintain. The weakest part of the website is the reviews. Various people act as reviewers, where they can review sellers or books. The quantity of reviews is pathetic. I have no issue with the quality of the reviews. But consider this - their top book reviewer has written 31 reviews. Followed by number 2 with 15 reviews. If you want a review of a book, you are VERY unlikely to find it here, let alone several reviews of that book. The website is simply too far behind Amazon (or B&N) in this respect. Unless they can come up with a novel way to quickly increase the number of reviews by several orders of magnitude, they should consider dropping the book reviews. For the store reviews, there are also very few. But this is mitigated somewhat by there not being many stores. In some ways, the store reviews here are superfluous. The stores are those companies mentioned above, plus a few others. These are not minor or unknown sellers, like you might find on eBay or Amazon Marketplace. In those case, feedback on the sellers can be quite useful to potential buyers. But for FetchBook, unless they enable any third party to be a seller, having someone review eBay or Amazon is simply unnecessary.

Great site. I've searched for many, many books on this site and I've *never* found this site not to show the cheapest price available anywhere for a given book. Also, the site is very fast compared to many other book search sites. I have two minor qualms about the site, which together are the reason for a rating of 4 instead of 5 stars: (1) I wish that the list of prices returned by the site for a given book would not include the current price of that book at ongoing eBay auctions. Because the auctions are in progress, the "current price" at the auction tends not to be indicative of a book's value. (On the other hand, I am glad that the site indexes the prices for a given book at "eBay Stores" because those prices, unlike the current price of an eBay auction, are not subject to change as a result of bidding.) (2) I wish that the list of prices returned for a given book would not include prices at sites that list the book as being "out of stock." When I'm interested in finding the cheapest price for a book, I want the list of cheapest prices to reflect only *currently available* copies -- not copies that might be available in the future.

fetchbook.info is probably the best shopping comparison tool I've ever ran into. It includes so many stores, that it saves you the leg work of comparing book prices. I've been using this site for a year now, and I'm only gratefull to the folks at fetchbook for launching such a great service. I dont know why the other guy above mentioned that it should be banned- it it just the best book shopping service I've ever ran into, and believe me, I'm buying a lot of books. fetchbok guys, thanks again!Darril.