Beyond Amazon.com: Comparison Shopping Service BookFinder.comIs a Bibliophile's Dream
BERKELEY, Calif., Nov. 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Recent stories in The New York Times indicate that relying on big brand names doesn't work for budget-conscious online shoppers. Rising prices at top online new bookstores, and limited, overpriced selection among brand name sellers of used and rare titles, are convincing more online shoppers to try BookFinder.com, an online comparison shopping service for new, used, and rare books.
-- The New York Times business journalist David D. Kirkpatrick documents
how Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble.com, and Borders.com have all been
raising their prices over the last few months; Amazon.com alone has
raised prices 10% across the board, he reports.
-- The New York Times consumer columnist Michelle Slatalla looks into
shopping for used, rare, and out-of-print books using much-hyped sites
like Alibris and Respond.com. She tries the services for herself, and
compares them to BookFinder.com, finding that they offer smaller
inventories, higher prices, and slower service than the independent
comparison shopping service.
BookFinder.com is a comparison shopping service for online book shoppers. Book shoppers can give it a title; it will search the inventories of over 20,000 booksellers, and return the best prices on both new and used editions. The November 10 issue of Entertainment Weekly names BookFinder.com as one of the best-kept secrets in cyberspace: "A no-frills meta search engine that scours over 20,000 online sources for new, out-of-print, first edition, or signed books. Shipping is direct from the seller, so no price mark-ups."
"You can use BookFinder.com to look for a book, and it'll find you better prices and a bigger selection that any one bookstore will have by itself," says BookFinder.com founder, Anirvan Chatterjee. "This means we can help you find cheaper copies of a new book carried at Amazon.com, deeply discounted used copies of a book that Barnes & Noble.com sells new, out-of-print titles that none of the big names carry, or even hard-to-find first editions carried only by specialists. Or we might be able to confirm that Amazon.com does have the best deal -- but only after verifying the prices at 20,000 other bookstores first. Smart book shoppers know where to turn to."
For the particularly bookishly inclined, BookFinder.com's extensive network of partner booksellers also makes it a great way to find rare and out-of-print books, with first editions and signed copies just a click away. London's Daily Telegraph raves about their recent discovery of BookFinder.com, "The other night, for some bizarre reason, I found myself sitting at a dinner party surrounded by grand literary types. Everyone was raving about a web site called www.BookFinder.com. I felt slightly ashamed that I had never heard of it. So the next day I went and had a peek. And do you know what? They were right. BookFinder.com is a bibliophile's dream."
"We shop online ourselves," Chatterjee adds, "so we're pretty skeptical of all the hyperbole out there. We're a bunch of high tech book geeks. We're not changing the world with the next wannabe e-commerce killer app; we've just built a much better way to shop for books online, which is why our service is recommended by everyone from Entertainment Weekly to the Library of Congress. We're the open marketplace for books online, and that just makes things easier."
(Sources: The New York Times, "Quietly, Booksellers Are Putting an End to the Discount Era" 10/9/2000; The New York Times, "Site Invites Shoppers To Wax Eloquent," 8/24/2000; The New York Times, "Measuring the Value of an Old Friend," 5/4/2000; Entertainment Weekly, "Recommended Sites for 2000," 11/10/2000; The Daily Telegraph (London), "How to buy the best on the Net," 10/28/2000)
BookFinder.com is the open marketplace for books online. The new web service allows readers to comparison shop for new, used, and rare books from any of 20,000 bookstores around the world. Originally developed in 1996 as a class project by founder Anirvan Chatterjee, it was recently relaunched as a literary shopping engine, with a database of over twenty million books for sale, making it the world's largest book catalog, either online or offline. BookFinder.com is recommended to book lovers by the New York Times and the Library of Congress, and BookFinder.com's low prices and huge selection makes it a favorite among professional book shoppers -- library acquisitions departments. BookFinder.com is produced by 13th Generation Media of Berkeley, California.
For BookFinder.com logo please go to: bookfinder.com
SOURCE BookFinder.com
CO: BookFinder.com
ST: California
IN: MLM EDU
SU:
11/21/2000 05:14 EST prnewswire.com |
