Category Archives: Booko

Posts about booko, some technical, some explaining new features

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.

Better World Books joins the list of sites Booko searches.

Booko, Shops

Thanks to Tyrone Butter and Andrew Wilson for suggesting another online bookstore – Better World Books.  This site has a flat $3.97 USD delivery fee to anywhere in the world. Even better, they have an easy to use API ( no screen scraping! ) and an Affilate program – which I’m yet to sign up for (requires American IRS paperwork!).

They also have a large selection of second hand books – I don’t include them in the results at the moment because it doesn’t seem fair to compare new pricing with old.  Any opinions out there on the value of including (somehow) second hand books?

In more geeky news, I’ve updated some of the testing code for Booko – it now tests the sites I scrape pricing information from to check if they have changed their HTML. Should make life easier.

Bug Fixes for IE

Booko

Well, I think I’ve found the bug that makes IE not work so well with Booko.  The section of the page which displays the prices is updated via AJAX (with a GET post), but the first chunk of text for that section (with the spinning icons) gets cached by IE. The solution is to add an Expires header to the response. The actions which respond to GET requests got the following code:

headers["Expires"] = "Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"

I should probably put a more correct value in there – but it’s always going to be set in the past at some point.

A Mass of Booko related things.

Booko, Shops

It’s been a busy week for Booko. I sent out some email to almost everybody in my address book, advertising Booko. If that’s why you’re here then, “Hello!”. Hello if you’re a friend of a friend.  But that’s it.

Thanks to Wendy, who recommended a new store, which I’ve just added to Booko – The Book Depository. Looks like it’s pretty competitive. Based in the UK, but with free World Wide Shipping it’s a good addition to the lineup. This brings the total stores searched to 16 – a nice round, base 2 number.

Angus & Robertson have updated their site. Looks pretty nice. One big improvement is that it’s now possible to link directly to book pages. For some reason, the URL for all book pages all begin with “fiction.angusrobertson” – I’ll have to keep an eye on that.  Performance seems way better than their old site.

Thanks to everyone who found bugs. The biggest downside of including your boss in your mass mail out is if he manages to find a bug. And naturally he did (Rob also found this bug). Turns out IE 6 sucks. If you search for a book, you only ever get spinning icons indicating that it’s looking up the price. It actually caches that page and never displays the prices. For this, I’m sorry. I’m not sure if I’ll fix it. I’ll have to check the stats and see how many of you are still on IE6.

Other bugs reported include another IE bug related to Javascript (Thanks Gilly!) and Paul pointed out that Booko degrades poorly when JavaScript has been disabled.

Feel free to send in any errors / ommisions / faults / bugs to bugz@booko.com.au

Random Booko updates

Booko

Well, I’ve added a blurb to Booko’s front page. Should have done this a while ago – makes it feel more like a proper website. It’s probably a bit too much text, but I’ll work on it.

Fixed a bug reported by Timo and Dan B (And probably others) – clicking “Add to Cart” before the prices were fully loaded made the cart behave pretty strangely – usually you’d get several items in your cart or some such. The problem was that the cart price can’t be calculated until all the prices are available. I’ve hidden the link to add items to the cart until all the prices are correct.

Figured out how to set a timeout for getting prices from stores – and set it to 15 seconds.  May need to tweak this a bit. Some shops were taking too long to respond.  (Thanks Dan B for the suggestion)

Tweaked the HTML for the cart, adding another separator. This site is now, without doubt, very separated.

More Cover Art

Booko

I’ve updated Booko to now check multiple sites for cover art.  All the sites I use for data will return “No Image” style images for books which they don’t have covers for.

Such as this:

There’s no way to tell from the URL of the image if it’s one of these pretend covers, so I had to be a bit more clever about it. Since the image itself is always the same, I calculate the md5 sum of the image – if it matches a known “No Image” image, I move on to the next site.

Given an image URL, I calculate the md5 sum like this:

digest = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(open(url).read)

Which downloads the image and calculates the hash in one nice easy step.  So, from now on, Books will be far more likely to have correct cover art images.

Want to know the Format of a book?

Booko,

Done! Well, where possible. I requested the guys at “The Nile” add the “Format” of a book to their API on Sunday. Literally 8am on Monday I got the response that they’d implemented it! That’s super fast! Amazon already has the feature and I’ve added it to the Fishpond scraper, so we would should be set. Unfortunately, not all books actually list the format of the book.  

I can see a common problem I have with getting book data from multiple sites – not all book “records” at each site contains all the information. Sometimes one site will have the format, but maybe not a good image of the cover. Sometimes a site will have neither. But generally, I just pick one sites data and go with that. It’s fast and easy. To get complete data, it looks like I’ll have to start making book records composites from multiple sites.