Some more small changes this arvo:
I’ve added another feature to Booko – Booko now remembers books you’ve recently viewed. This should save you from having to search again, or add them to your cart to keep track of books you’re interested in. Of course, it’s only session based – lists will be different on different computers / browsers.
I’ve updated the program which runs off and finds the prices on the 15 shops Booko scans. Previously, it would search for a single book at a time, but would search all shops at the same time. Now it will check *all* books which are waiting for prices at the same time.
One of the problems with the old approach is that some stores seem to be down as much as up – the price grabbing code will patiently wait until all shops have answered or the connection times out. When a site is down, other users may be waiting for over a minute for their books to be updated. The new approach means everyone should be getting prices as soon as they’re available.
So, if you’re the kind of person who does a search, then opens multiple tabs from the search result, you should find the results are populated much, much faster.
One of the more interesting blogs I read is Core Economics, by Joshua Gans, a professor at Melbourne Business School. He recently published a book – Parentomics. In the comment section of the post where he announced it, I mentioned that he could find pricing for his book in a bunch of Australian book stores on Booko. He subsequently wrote a quick post on Booko – linking to books he’s published.
Most of the people who use Booko know that it’s currently a personal project that’s not been advertised very widely. The impact of being mentioned on a site like CoreEconomics was pretty exciting / terrifying to see.
That made me decide that its time for Booko to have it’s own blog rather than share my personal blog – so here it is. You can find all the all Booko posts on my personal blog.