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It is with great pleasure that I inform you, the BookFinder.com user, that today it is finally possible to perform a search which is not restricted by books written in our main supported languages (without resorting to 'Classic Search').  You can now perform a search for searches for books written in everything from Latin to Lithuania, Swedish to Swahili and you can find it with our regular search, simply choose "Any Language" from our language filter.  

The only caveat I should mention is that if you do open up to all languages remember to be very specific with your searches, especially if the book in question was written in more than one language with the same title. Also be aware that BookFinder.com only currently supports Latin script.  Otherwise the world should now be your oyster.

Collectors have been asking for this feature for quite some time, so hopefully it is well received.  Please let us know what you think, and of course if you find any strange behavior please let us know.

Happy Hunting.

We have a new, and admittedly long overdue, feature to tell you about.  BookFinder.com users can now enter minimum and/or maximum publishing dates to limit your search results.  This should make finding specific editions much easier; and additionally while not a specific Print On Demand (POD) filter, it should help users who want to eliminate PODs from search results for older books - Since most PODs have been published within the last 5-10 years limiting your search to books published before ~2005 works reasonably well as a make shift POD filter.

At this point you probably have two questions:

Why didn’t you do this before?
One reason this feature took us so long to implement is that not every bookseller on BookFinder.com includes publishing date as a searchable data-point; when we first considered adding a publishing date filter we would have been eliminating as many as 60% of all books from searches simply because publish year was not a searchable field on many data feeds.  However over the years more bookselling sites added this data point to their APIs and data feeds we are now able to roll out this improvement with the knowledge that most of the available books are searchable by publish date.  Some websites we search still don’t offer publish date as a searchable field, so you may still find some discrepancy but this should be a minority case.

When are you going to build a full POD filter?
We would love to do it this week, but similar to the publish date quandary described above we are not yet able to offer a proper POD exclusion method that would work while including an appropriately large cross section of books that BookFinder.com searches.  We are absolutely aware of how valued POD suppression would be for some of our users, and as soon as we can provide a product which meets our standards we will put it in your hands.

In the meantime hopefully the publishing date filter is helpful. Please let us know what you think of it, if you find any bugs, or if there are other site improvements we can make.  

With thanks.

The BookFinder.com team

Do you love technology? Do you love books? Do you have great interpersonal and communication skills? Do you live to build and support great software teams? Do you thrive in a fast paced e-commerce environment? If the answer is yes please read on.

If you are a software engineer and want to live in the Pacific Northwest BookFinder.com is currently looking for two positions.  1) Software Engineering Manager and 2) an experienced Software Engineer to be a part of a small agile team in our Vancouver B.C. office

If you are interested take a look at the job postings which are located on our parent company’s website.  All of the qualifications and contact details are listed there however please feel free to contact us with any questions you might have about the positions.  We hope to hear from you.

[Now Reading: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald]

BookFinder.com está ahora disponible en español. Para ver la traducción al español, simplemente haga clic en "Ver BookFinder.com en: Español" en nuestro sitio web, tal como se muestra en la imagen siguiente.

We are very happy to announce that we have now launched a complete Spanish translation of our website.  We have long search the Spanish catalogues of various booksellers but until now users had to navigate our website in Dutch, English, French, or German.

If you are most comfortable with Spanish, just to “View BookFinder.com in: Español” on our homepage below the search box (seen below)

BookFinder.com está ahora disponible en español. Para ver la traducción al español, simplemente haga clic en "Ver BookFinder.com en: Español" en nuestro sitio web, tal como se muestra en la imagen siguiente.

We are very happy to announce that we have now launched a complete Spanish translation of our website.  We have long search the Spanish catalogues of various booksellers but until now users had to navigate our website in Dutch, English, French, or German.

If you are most comfortable with Spanish, just to “View BookFinder.com in: Español” on our homepage below the search box (seen below)

I just wanted say thank you to everyone who completed the BookFinder.com survey.  I'll be closing it up in a couple minutes and then going over all the input and suggestions that you gave us, and at a first glance it looks like we have some really good feedback.

Your input is extremely helpful when considering new ideas, and as such we really appreciate everyone who took a couple minutes out of their day to offer their opinions.  So thank you.

In other news, I think we finally tracked down the problem that was causing some users to randomly receive 403/404 errors that were blocking access to our search.  With the help of a couple VERY helpful BookFinder.com users we were able to finally replicate the problem ourselves and last week we worked out a fix.  Since then we have been monitoring the results and it seems as if we have fixed it. 

This was very frustrating for us since we knew users were having problems but we could never replicate the issue on our side, which made finding the root cause quite difficult.  So again I would like to say thank you to all the BookFinder.com users who contacted us and provided valuable information that helped us find this problem and solve it.

If you are still having problems, or ever have problems please do send us an email to let us know about any bugs on our site.

[Now Reading: Foundation and Empire by Issac Asimov]

I just wanted say thank you to everyone who completed the BookFinder.com survey.  I'll be closing it up in a couple minutes and then going over all the input and suggestions that you gave us, and at a first glance it looks like we have some really good feedback.

Your input is extremely helpful when considering new ideas, and as such we really appreciate everyone who took a couple minutes out of their day to offer their opinions.  So thank you.

In other news, I think we finally tracked down the problem that was causing some users to randomly receive 403/404 errors that were blocking access to our search.  With the help of a couple VERY helpful BookFinder.com users we were able to finally replicate the problem ourselves and last week we worked out a fix.  Since then we have been monitoring the results and it seems as if we have fixed it. 

This was very frustrating for us since we knew users were having problems but we could never replicate the issue on our side, which made finding the root cause quite difficult.  So again I would like to say thank you to all the BookFinder.com users who contacted us and provided valuable information that helped us find this problem and solve it.

If you are still having problems, or ever have problems please do send us an email to let us know about any bugs on our site.

[Now Reading: Foundation and Empire by Issac Asimov]

A few of you have mentioned to us that you have been experiencing problems with connecting to BookFinder.com in the past week.  Some people have experienced 404 Errors and 403 Errors when viewing different BookFinder.com pages. 

Thank you for pointing out these issues, because of your messages we are aware of what is happening and are working on a solution to fix the problem completely.

In most cases the errors are intermittent, and if you do happen to experience a 404 or 403 error on a BookFinder.com page, please try refreshing the page (ctrl + F5).  In many cases a simple refresh will bring up the correct page.  There are cases, however, where the error persists.

If you continue to have issues connecting to the site we apologize and ask for your continued patience as we fix this issue.

Sincerely

The BookFinder.com Team

As a BookFinder.com user you probably didn’t even notice but last week we just picked up and moved servers.  For several years we were running our servers from around BookFinder.com’s birthplace of Berkley, CA but last week we packed up our bytes and moved our digital home.   Now we are happy to announce that we are up and running on the Elastic Compute Cloud, which is a cloud computing platform developed by Amazon.  Charlie and Bryan (our dynamic programming duo) are very excited about this change, since not only is cloud computing a cutting edge technology but it should also provide BookFinder.com with a flexibility and scalability that we have never previously had.

So if you are like me the question you are probably asking yourself right now is, “so what does this mean for me?” and the non-technical short answer is “very little.”  Our search functions will remain the same, and while we may run a little faster now the look and feel of BookFinder.com will stay the same.  The real benefit of this change is behind the scenes here.  Kind of selfish I know but, I think we deserve it =).

Hopefully now we can get back to trying to add new bookstores and additional services that will help you book buyers find the books that you need and love!

[Now Reading: Prelude to Foundation by Issac Asimov]

As a BookFinder.com user you probably didn’t even notice but last week we just picked up and moved servers.  For several years we were running our servers from around BookFinder.com’s birthplace of Berkley, CA but last week we packed up our bytes and moved our digital home.   Now we are happy to announce that we are up and running on the Elastic Compute Cloud, which is a cloud computing platform developed by Amazon.  Charlie and Bryan (our dynamic programming duo) are very excited about this change, since not only is cloud computing a cutting edge technology but it should also provide BookFinder.com with a flexibility and scalability that we have never previously had.

So if you are like me the question you are probably asking yourself right now is, “so what does this mean for me?” and the non-technical short answer is “very little.”  Our search functions will remain the same, and while we may run a little faster now the look and feel of BookFinder.com will stay the same.  The real benefit of this change is behind the scenes here.  Kind of selfish I know but, I think we deserve it =).

Hopefully now we can get back to trying to add new bookstores and additional services that will help you book buyers find the books that you need and love!

[Now Reading: Prelude to Foundation by Issac Asimov]

If you ever wanted to add a BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin the option is now available.

If you are about to ask "What's OpenSearch" it's that small search box to the right the URL display on your browser.  Here you can automatically search on your favorite website (obviously BookFinder.com, right?) without having to first enter their URL. If you want to add BookFinder.com as one of your search options It's very easy to do. 

In Firefox simply go to the BookFinder.com homepage and then click on the small downward facing arrow like so:

From here just click the "Add "BookFinder.com" button and viola, instant BookFinder.com searches from anywhere on the internet.

In Internet Explorer the procedure is the same and the screen should look like this: 

Now whenever you want to compare prices with BookFinder.com you can immediately do a keyword search from wherever you happen to be on the web without having to load our homepage.

If you ever wanted to add a BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin the option is now available.

If you are about to ask "What's OpenSearch" it's that small search box to the right the URL display on your browser.  Here you can automatically search on your favorite website (obviously BookFinder.com, right?) without having to first enter their URL. If you want to add BookFinder.com as one of your search options It's very easy to do. 

In Firefox simply go to the BookFinder.com homepage and then click on the small downward facing arrow like so:

From here just click the "Add "BookFinder.com" button and viola, instant BookFinder.com searches from anywhere on the internet.

In Internet Explorer the procedure is the same and the screen should look like this: 

Now whenever you want to compare prices with BookFinder.com you can immediately do a keyword search from wherever you happen to be on the web without having to load our homepage.

I've been working on BookFinder.com for almost 13 years now, but even the most amazing experiences come to an end. I'll be exiting BookFinder.com in August, heading out on the very best of terms, and after years of planning to ensure that our users aren't impacted by the transition.

BookFinder.com started off as my class project in 1996. My best friend Charlie built the 486 computer that it ran on, and we teamed up in 1999 to rewrite the software and run the site as our small business. We've been together every step of the way, designing, building, and managing BookFinder.com (and debating books and politics over lunch every day). I'm delighted to be able to pass my role on to him; the site's in incredibly good hands.

I've been planning to step back for several years now, to work on other projects, travel, and explore new opportunities. Please stay in touch:

• via my homepage and weblog
• via email, to anirvan (at) chatterjee (dot) net

I'm deeply grateful to the bibliophiles, booksellers, and marketplace operators I've worked with over the years. I've heard some pretty amazing stories, and I always promised myself that when I had some time, I'd try to collect and share them with others.

That's why I'm launching the Online Bookselling History Project, an effort to collect first-hand accounts of the online bookselling trade before 2000. If you were involved with the trade pre-2000, then I want your stories: bookseller BBSes, UIEE conversion nightmares, changing cataloging practices, the bricks vs. clicks debates, etc. You can help put together a patchwork history of our trade during a time of great transition. More on this soon.

— Anirvan Chatterjee

P.S. Thank you to everyone who's been part of BookFinder.com since 1996 -- Alison, Asok, Barbara, Boris, Bryan, Chaitee, Charlie, Christine, David, Fredrik, Garner, Giovanni, Hannes, Scott, Shaku, Shauna, Thomas, Tushar, Vanessa, and Wendy. I'm lucky to have friends like you.

[Now Reading: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh]

I've been working on BookFinder.com for almost 13 years now, but even the most amazing experiences come to an end. I'll be exiting BookFinder.com in August, heading out on the very best of terms, and after years of planning to ensure that our users aren't impacted by the transition.

BookFinder.com started off as my class project in 1996. My best friend Charlie built the 486 computer that it ran on, and we teamed up in 1999 to rewrite the software and run the site as our small business. We've been together every step of the way, designing, building, and managing BookFinder.com (and debating books and politics over lunch every day). I'm delighted to be able to pass my role on to him; the site's in incredibly good hands.

I've been planning to step back for several years now, to work on other projects, travel, and explore new opportunities. Please stay in touch:

• via my homepage and weblog
• via email, to anirvan (at) chatterjee (dot) net

I'm deeply grateful to the bibliophiles, booksellers, and marketplace operators I've worked with over the years. I've heard some pretty amazing stories, and I always promised myself that when I had some time, I'd try to collect and share them with others.

That's why I'm launching the Online Bookselling History Project, an effort to collect first-hand accounts of the online bookselling trade before 2000. If you were involved with the trade pre-2000, then I want your stories: bookseller BBSes, UIEE conversion nightmares, changing cataloging practices, the bricks vs. clicks debates, etc. You can help put together a patchwork history of our trade during a time of great transition. More on this soon.

— Anirvan Chatterjee

P.S. Thank you to everyone who's been part of BookFinder.com since 1996 -- Alison, Asok, Barbara, Boris, Bryan, Chaitee, Charlie, Christine, David, Fredrik, Garner, Giovanni, Hannes, Scott, Shaku, Shauna, Thomas, Tushar, Vanessa, and Wendy. I'm lucky to have friends like you.

[Now Reading: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh]