Danny Gorog26 September 2008, 11:43 AM
A new Australian book price comparison site will help you find the cheapest technical books and also calculate delivery costs.
What started as a "personal itch" for local developer Dan Milne has turned into a very useful service for Australians looking to buy technical and other books - especially with more book stores coming online. Milne's Booko searches 16 different book sellers and provides pricing results that also include delivery costs. Techies will appreciate the no-frills interface: to search for a book you input the book's title, author or ISBN into the search field and get all matches for that book. Select one, and you are shown the prices for the book from up to 16 book sellers.
Milne has also done some clever programming to calculate shipping prices when you're buying multiple books. As you add products to your Booko cart Booko automatically keeps track of the best shipping deal since many web sellers provide shipping discounts when buying multiple products.
I tested Booko on a couple of popular programming titles which I found here. The first book, The Guru's Guide to SQL Server Stored Procedures, XML, and HTML was cheapest from Amazon US (including currency conversion and shipping) by over 20 percent from local supplier Fishpond. Similarly, the second book I selected, Programming C#: Building .NET Applications with C# was also substantially cheaper from Amazon too. More popular books like The Da Vinci Code were cheaper from local sellers but not by much.
While most books seem to be cheaper from Amazon, another book from Australian bookseller Fishpond, Ruby Programming for the Absolute Beginner was $10 cheaper at UK bookseller Book Depository.
Booko is easy to use and well laid out, but because it uses screen scraping to get results it can be a little slow. Still, if you've got an extra minute spare when you're buying a book online and you want to find the best price quickly, Booko might a be a good place to start your search.