All posts by Dan Milne

New Hosting for Booko

Booko

Booko’s got some shiny new hosting! I’ve moved to a new Slicehost host doing nothing but serving up Booko pages. I’ve decided to try Ubuntu for hosting this time, moving from my much loved Gentoo, just for something different. I’m more familiar with Debian, but Ubuntu is very similar and I feel like something new. I’ve not done any performance testing, but it certainly feels snappier. 😉

Booko’s DNS has also been moved to Slicehost’s DNS hosting. Just to get everything in one place.

The blog will stay on the old host, shrunk down a bit now that it’s doing less work. Also, I’ve now added Online Bargain Megastore.

A few new features for Booko, a few new bugs.

Booko, Shops

Booko now calculates the savings you’ll make between the price of the cheapest store, and the most expensive store, including the percentage saved. Plus, I’ve setup affiliate links for Better World Books – not that that’s a feature as such, but it should hopefully help me pay for hosting Booko.

I’ve also discovered a couple of bugs with Booko which need fixin’, one online shop changed their site meaning I need to fix the price scraper, plus I upgraded my Ruby install without fully testing it. The ActiveRecord component of Ruby on Rails introduced database connection pooling – which is great but the default values were too small for Booko. Some of you may have discovered only half the prices being downloaded for books – sorry about that. 

Thanks to Andrew from Online Bargain Megastore, I’ll hopefully be adding http://oo.com.au/ to Booko sometime soon, bringing the total number of stores checked to 19.

Search “All” now available

Booko

The most confusing aspect of Booko for new users is having to choose between the various search engines (The Amazons, The Nile or Fishpond) to find their book. Users often think they need to search on all the sites manually to get prices for their books, when actually, the search segment is literally, just to find the book – the price comparison is the second step.

Well, Booko should now be much easier to use (hopefully). I’ve added an “All” search option as the default search method. Searching “All” will search all four of the sites listed and aggregate the results.  

 

Continue reading Search “All” now available →

Parallel importation restrictions review

Booko

In The Age recently:

THE usually calm waters of the book industry is likely to be stirred up by the news that the Government has asked the Productivity Commission to consider lifting parallel importation restrictions on books.

Read the full article in full here.

Naturally, Australian book publishers are against it, Book sellers are for it.  The same thing happened to CD imports a few years ago and many claimed it would be the death of Australian music. Didn’t turn out that way.

Update:

You can signup via email for more information about this report on the Productivity Commission’s website.

Better World Books

Booko, Shops

The awesome people at Better World Books have extended a 10% discount on books (not delivery) to Booko users until the end of the year. It’s a single use coupon so use it wisely! Coupon code is: JHAL08 

Better World are somewhat different to most other online book stores in that they also include a large selection of used books. They help fund literacy programs all around the world. Read more about them on their site.