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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]

I just wanted to post a short apology to anyone who was trying to access BookFinder.com this afternoon.  We had a small server problem and as such some of you may have had your searches go to error earlier today. 

The problem is fixed now and everything is once again running smoothly, so if you did have issues this afternoon you can now perform the search anytime.

Thanks for your patience.

I just wanted to post a short apology to anyone who was trying to access BookFinder.com this afternoon.  We had a small server problem and as such some of you may have had your searches go to error earlier today. 

The problem is fixed now and everything is once again running smoothly, so if you did have issues this afternoon you can now perform the search anytime.

Thanks for your patience.

Well I am taking holidays off blogging and won't be posting here again until the new year.  So for your amusement over the holidays feel free to play around with The Limricktionary - a must for word nerds everywhere.

Just pick the word you want defined and you shall be returned with a definition in limerick form.

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

It may not always be obvious from the outside but we are constantly improving BookFinder.com to make it a better service for students, bibliophiles, collectors, and booksellers.  Over the past several weeks one of our programmers, Bryan, has been working on a project trying to see if he could improve the speed of our book search.

If you know a little about databases, and little is a word I would use to describe my knowledge of database searching, one of the more classic search problems is that as the amount of data you are looking at gets larger it takes proportionately longer to search though all the information.  So as you can guess this makes a quick search of millions upon millions of books from dozens of different websites all over the world a bit of a problem.

The fast solution would be to just limit our search time but we also know that you, our loyal users, come to BookFinder.com for our price comparisons of new and used books as well as for searching far and wide looking for rare, out-of-print, and downright hard to find books.  So we obviously we could never sacrifice breadth of search for speed or you might not find that 18th century periodical on gardening practices in West Suffolk which you were looking for.

So when Bryan announced at our weekly meeting that, after some intensive investigation followed by a couple weeks of hacking away at our search algorithms, he had managed to shave several seconds off our average search time I felt it was worth a bit of a brag. 

So enjoy our latest BookFinder.com improvement.  Same great BookFinder.com search, now 60% faster.

It may not always be obvious from the outside but we are constantly improving BookFinder.com to make it a better service for students, bibliophiles, collectors, and booksellers.  Over the past several weeks one of our programmers, Bryan, has been working on a project trying to see if he could improve the speed of our book search.

If you know a little about databases, and little is a word I would use to describe my knowledge of database searching, one of the more classic search problems is that as the amount of data you are looking at gets larger it takes proportionately longer to search though all the information.  So as you can guess this makes a quick search of millions upon millions of books from dozens of different websites all over the world a bit of a problem.

The fast solution would be to just limit our search time but we also know that you, our loyal users, come to BookFinder.com for our price comparisons of new and used books as well as for searching far and wide looking for rare, out-of-print, and downright hard to find books.  So we obviously we could never sacrifice breadth of search for speed or you might not find that 18th century periodical on gardening practices in West Suffolk which you were looking for.

So when Bryan announced at our weekly meeting that, after some intensive investigation followed by a couple weeks of hacking away at our search algorithms, he had managed to shave several seconds off our average search time I felt it was worth a bit of a brag. 

So enjoy our latest BookFinder.com improvement.  Same great BookFinder.com search, now 60% faster.

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]

It came to my attention that I have been neglecting those of you who who have absolutely no desire to learn about ereaders so today I promise this is the last you will hear about them from me.  Today instead I thought I would share two articles about reading and how it can effect your social life. 

If you belong to a book club you may be happy to learn that and an an increasing number of authors are jobbing their way around various book clubs to discuss, with their readers, what they thought of the novel.  I think it might take away from the whole book club process if you bring the author in right away but after a discussion about the book, getting to actually ask the author questions about the text could be a really neat experience, and a good reason to read and coming authors. 

And then moving from from friends recommending a good book, to books recommending a good friend.  LibraryThing.com and the aforementioned Goodreads.com have shown that this works pretty well but The Guardian thinks that relationships based on books should stay at the friend level.  The British paper takes a pot shot, in a fairly amusing article, at Boarders launching its dating service for bibliophiles suggesting that looking for love based on reading tastes can only lead to heartache. 

Earlier this week the LA Times printed a story about four Martin Luther King Jr. books which are slated to be brought back into print in time for the celebration of what would have been King's 80th birthday (Jan. 18th, 2010). 

This sort of thing happens all the time, books that have been all but forgotten are rejuvenated with a new print run allowing new generations to enjoy them.  Most of the time I hardly give this a second thought since it happens so often however this week I have been spending a lot of time looking at books on the verge of the in/out-of print boarder line.

I have been allocating all my spare time to research for the annual BookFinder.com Report - which lists the most sought after out-of-print books in the US, and more often than not these are the books that are right on this line.  Last year a number of books on our list were brought back into print due to the surge in popularity and I think we might see a few more this year.

When finished list is always interesting to read but for every book that makes it onto the list there are a number of books which just fail to meet our criteria because they are brought back from the out-of-print abyss just as interest in its out-of-print counterpart starts to increase.

One such book is the autobiography of moonshiner Popcorn Sutton titled Me and my Likker.  A local legend in Tennessee as a distiller he wrote the book in 1999 only to have it fall out-of-print for ten years until this past March when Bent Corner Books, a Knoxville bookstore, republished the work after Mr. Sutton's passing.  It is still amazingly hard to find, but it is back in print.

If I get the time I might try and compile a blog post with a few more of these near-misses but in the mean time I have to get back to the report.

[Now reading: Vernon God Little by DBC Pierre]

Something I've been meaning to share for a long time is this Wondermark comic about the role of books.

So, are you a bibliophibian?

Shauna one of my BookFinder.com colleagues found two neat posts on Boing Boing today and I wanted to share them with you.

First.  Today is Bloomsday, and if you download this Mp3 you can hear the one and only James Joyce reading from his own Ulysses.  If that link dosen't work try this mirror link

Second.  If you are living in Canada, more specificly Ontario, there is a Book Drive for Aboriginal Youth happening until the 21st of June which is collecting books to send to isolated communities in Canada's north.  Here is the description from the original post:

The deadline, June 21, is only a few days away, unfortunately. If someone from outside Ontario REALLY wants to help out, feel free to get hold of me directly at [email protected] and you can make arrangements to send a book or two to me, and I'll get it into the donation stream. But for those of you who live in Ontario, or nearby (I'm lookin' at you, folks in northern New York, Michigan, Minnesota, etc.!) this is a great chance to get some new reading material into the hands of kids who really, really need it.

Happy Bloomsday everyone!

I don't know if you notice to the swath of "summer reading" lists that are posted on every media platform known to man each year around this time?  I do, because its my job, and most of them suck.  The vast majority of the books on parade sound like a great way to ruin all the good weather and pleasant scenery that mother nature could muster on even the best summer afternoon.

Just because it's summer does not mean you have to read crap.  Reading this Esquire article, I am not alone in my views.  The columnist took one for the team and actually sat down to read Dean Koontz, Harlan Coben and David Baldacci - so we wouldn't have to.  Here is his take:

I like a walk as much as the next guy but I also like reading in a hammock. So I want to ask, what is the best book you have read so far this summer?  Maybe we can collect some comments and post a list of books that you may actually WANT to read this summer.

I don't know if you notice to the swath of "summer reading" lists that are posted on every media platform known to man each year around this time?  I do, because its my job, and most of them suck.  The vast majority of the books on parade sound like a great way to ruin all the good weather and pleasant scenery that mother nature could muster on even the best summer afternoon.

Just because it's summer does not mean you have to read crap.  Reading this Esquire article, I am not alone in my views.  The columnist took one for the team and actually sat down to read Dean Koontz, Harlan Coben and David Baldacci - so we wouldn't have to.  Here is his take:

I like a walk as much as the next guy but I also like reading in a hammock. So I want to ask, what is the best book you have read so far this summer?  Maybe we can collect some comments and post a list of books that you may actually WANT to read this summer.

I always wondered what happened to all the card catalogs once libraries went digital... I'm glad they are still being put to good use.

Here is a neat blog with photo's of card catalogs in peoples homes...

This year I am proclaiming March to be the month of math and I urge you all to host your own geometrical galas to celebrate a pair of algebraic anniversaries.  For this March we celebrate both Square Root Day and Pi Day, a feat which only occurs once each century.

Square root day is held on the date that both the day and the month are both a square root of the last two digits of the year; so this year it’s March 3rd, 2009 (3/3/09).    Celebrating is easy.  When eating your all important three square meals don't forget your root vegetables like potatoes, turnips, beets, carrots, or parsnips; but remember to cut them quadrilaterally. Date squares, or any other square really, will also make an excellent dessert.  After your meal have a try at square dancing, or if that’s not your cup of tea head to your local elementary school yard for a round of square ball.  Although in truth the most perfect square root day activity is, of course, the magic square.  Remember to get you fill though since the next time you can celebrate is April 4th 2016.

Then two weeks you later continue your mathematical merriment on March 14th when we celebrate Pi day, at 1:59 (am if you’re a purist, pm if you’re happy with the 12 hour clock).  Again food plays heavily into celebrations and mass quantities of sweet and savory pies are eaten along with pizza (pie) and things containing pineapple or pine nuts (both of which are good on the aforementioned pizza); pina coladas are often the beverage of choice.  Traditionally meals are eaten at exactly 1:59, but if you do choose another snacking time I suggest meals which approximate pie, such as a Cornish Pastry.

After your very early breakfast (or late lunch), sit down and write a pi-ku poetry which can take a number of forms. 

Firstly you could try a haiku about Pi, I borrowed this one from TeachPi.org
Unending digits...
Why not keep it simple, like
Twenty-two sevenths?

Or add a Pi twist to haiku and use the 3, 1, 4 syllable format as I did here
Number Pi
Is
Never ending

Reciting  pi with a friend can consume a large part of your day, here is a site which has calculated pi to 4000 decimals.  If all of this is sounding a little too nerdy for you you can read Life of Pi, which has absolutely nothing to do with math or watch Pi the movie.

Hopefully this double dose of function fiestas can hold you over until October 24th at 6:02 when we rejoice with our chemistry brethren and celebrate Mole day.

*edit* - ... I just saw this via Boing Boing and could not resist.  Pi-Day ice cube trays

Charlie and I spend a lot of time talking about books. Specifically, what makes a book a book. It may be because of his predilection for reading (heavy!) thousand-page fantasy novels, but he's been dabbling with hardware- and software-based ebook platforms for a while now. Charlie's last foray into the land of the e-book reading platform, the Sony Reader, was pretty much a failure. It sustained his interest for a while, but eventually never managed to fit into his workflow, due to bad desktop client software and lack of interesting content. Unusable as a book reader, then he tried to use it as a "computer-lite" to display RSS feeds; it worked up to a point, but was very inelegant, largely because of inherent device limitations.

Charlie's mental jump—from seeing the Sony Reader as an electronic book, to a portable computer text display device—reflects the same insight that Virginia Hefferman's son had, in her recent article on the Amazon Kindle:

There's a social role for books, books that look and feel like books. I fully expect to buy an ebook reader sometime in the next few years (I'm rarely an early adopter), but I'm acutely aware of the fact that you lose things along the way. I've had long conversations with friends about the role of record cover art; those who grew up in the age of records have a very different relationship with it compared to those who saw cover art shrink down to fit cassettes, CDs, and iPod screens. I'm not ready to make a value judgment on how important cover art really is, but I do know that eighteen year olds seem to have a disproportionate amount of 60s-70s rock cover art posters on their walls, versus cover art from the 2000s. If nothing else, I fully expect to see some print editions of classic angsty lit in college dorm rooms in the 2040s.

For the last several years, I've been the webmaster for my friend Chitra Divakaruni, a mid-career novelist and poet. Her website talks a bit about her and each of her books. It's pretty simple, and hasn't changed dramatically in a long time.

Chitra has the paperback of her latest novel coming out soon, as well as a new book for young adults. This, along with the ongoing death of US newspaper book sections, has lit a fire under us, and we're trying to think beyond the website, embracing social media to better reach readers where they're at. We have a mailing list set up, and are syndicating tour dates on BookTour.com; a blog and an expanded Facebook presence are on their way. It's been exciting to see the kind of positive feedback Chitra's already been getting from readers able to connect directly to a favorite writer.

The New York Times recently ran a piece on the new business of big budget author websites, online book launches, and author promo videos. As much as I'm into this sort of thing, some of the tactics just seem excessive. Is it really worth spending $35,000 to launch a promotional website for a novel? Does a website for a book really need an original score? Apparently I'm not alone in my confusion; publishers, bullish as they are, also seem to be a bit fuzzy on the ROI. (The article does mention that in a specific study, 8% of readers had visited author websites in the past week; by extension, 92% hadn't.)

How are your purchases swayed by author or book websites?