Jason Davis at Book Bee is certainly the most insect-friendly ebooker I know. He’s just incubated and hatched Ebook Ant, a new ebook search and comparison site.
Currently they’ve indexed 270,000 non-public domain ebooks from “the likes of ebooks.com, Amazon, Barnes and Noble and more. There are also almost 40,000 emagazines, from emagazines.com and others, eTextbooks from eCampus.com and CengageBrain, newspapers from wherever we could get ‘em, and even eChapters.”
Take a look. Actually, if I had done it I would have tried to be a bit more Australian about it all and would have named the site Ebook Tobacco Looper.
Good idea, but the site needs work. I checked two books–Burning Lamp by Amanda Quick and Cherry Bomb by J. A. Konrath. For Burning Lamp, they only show ebooks.com. It is also available at B & N and Amazon. For Cherry Bomb, they show ebooks.com and Amazon, but it says the Amazon price is $17.99. The actual Amazon price is $9.99. Cherry Bomb is also available at Barnes & Noble for $9.99.
Thanks for the input, Diane. Yep, we’re working to improve the search all the time. We’ve been a little hampered by the quality of data we get – even from the big sites. For example, Amazon don’t include discount info on Kindle books in their data, and a couple of larger sites aren’t set up to allow 3rd party database access at all!
But we’re working with them to fix this as fast as we can.
If we keep improving, It’s a win-win-win situation, I reckon.
Bookbee, I did a search for Penguin Riverside’s popular Imperfect Birds.
Doesn’t show Amazon though — Maybe your search is looking in the field for Amazon price? Now that Penguin is setting the price, Amazon makes that clear and then doesn’t put a price under the “Amazon” price column of the table.
I checked inkmesh.com and they find Amazon for the e-book, though their shown-price is less than the price set by Penguin for the book (that higher price is followed by B&N). Maybe Inkmesh has the pre-negotiations expected-pricing, but the Amazon search result lets you get to it and see the actual current price.
Good luck on the new page! Not easy to try to track e-book pricing right now.
Bookbee,
I should have added that Amazon puts the publisher’s price under a 2nd column rather than under the Amazon price column.
Thanks Andrys. As you saw, it’s a bit of a minefield doing this in a market in which the dust is still settling! We’re knocking on a lot of doors to get the data – and therefore the search – as accurate as we can.