isbn.net.in – One Place to find the best online price for a book in India
I had an itch – I wished there was a simple way of deciding whether to buy a book and where to buy a book. So I created http://isbn.net.in
The initial idea I had was to make a bookmarklet that will do everything – it will figure out the unique book number (the ISBN) from the current book page (whether a publisher’s site or any ecommerce site), and then search on all the potential Indian online book stores. I then realized that you can’t fetch from other domains because of the same-domain policy of AJAX (I could’ve used YQL or something like that, but I felt it was a slippery slope).
So I had to create a web backend that will do the searching on behalf of the bookmarklet and changed the idea to simply show a jQueryUI dialog showing the sorted list of prices.
Then I chanced upon http://isbn.nu and immediately said to myself: “I want that with Indian prices”. Since I was half-way there already, it took a few additional steps of buying a good domain name and configuring to use the simple URL format they used.
There was one major problem with the bookmarklet – on sites which already have jQuery, it used to conflict, and although jQuery itself can live with multiple versions side-by-side, I could never figure out if jQueryUI was loaded properly or not. I tried various things but had to give up in vain.
Finally, I decided the pop-up overlay thing was not important, and the bookmarklet can just simply take you to the correct isbn.net.in page directly.
So the “where” part of the question was answered.
I still had to answer the “whether” part of the question – that’s when a friend told me about Amazon ECS using which I was able to get the very useful Amazon ratings. Then I was able to get the image of the cover of the book and other details.
Then I came across bookseer.com which makes great book recommendations, so I included an automatic link to that on the book page.
So, after much ado, I present http://isbn.net.in to you. All the instructions are on the homepage.
If you have any feedback, please read the disclaimers on the homepage and the About page, and then send me feedback.
Implementation was a lot of fun – I used Ruby, Sinatra, HAML, Mechanize, amazon-ecs, jQuery, Blueprint CSS. It was the first time I had really used any of these.
Disclaimer: I created isbn.net.in because I needed a tool like this. This has nothing to do whatsoever with my employer. It is just a personal side-project.
Updates on Praise, Feedback and New Feature: See isbn.net.in updates article.
(19 votes, average: 4.89 out of 5)
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March 11th, 2010 at 9:11 am
I was searching for a book from past 1 week and was unable to find it. Thanks to you, finally I was able get my book at flipkart. It was like, I thought I’ll not get that book any where in Bangalore and I open my google reader to see your link. Bingo, I have placed an order and eagerly looking forward for the delivery. Thanks a ton. You do not know how much it meant for me to have that book.
March 11th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Nice initiative,
There is a similar search engine http://www.iglooo.in/ that crawls the web and helps find out prices of books…
March 11th, 2010 at 10:41 am
I have been using http://iglooo.in for sometime. But isbn.net.in has larger list of websites than it. Great job!
March 11th, 2010 at 10:41 am
You could also add isbn microformats (http://microformats.org/wiki/isbn) as a fallback for other sites in your http://isbn.net.in/js/bookmarklet_runner.js and instead of adding “Random” query parameter everytime, you could version the javascript files so that they are cached in the browser and you can reduce some load on your servers
March 11th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Wow, that is great. Thanks for the tool!
March 11th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
If i need to search for prices of a book , I have to do two things
I want to do it in a single step
I know its simplification of developers job if ISBN number is given , but difficult for end users
Calibre ( ebook managment tool ) , on other hand gets the ISBN number from isbn.org based on book name and author name , some thing similar wud have been more useful !
March 11th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Awesome & Thanks a lot!
March 11th, 2010 at 10:33 pm
it will be great if you could add even http://landmarkonthenet.com Their prices are simply unbeatable, although their collection is rather limited.
March 12th, 2010 at 11:30 am
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March 12th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Really nice.
Read this too : http://blog.flipkart.com/first-comes-love-then-comes-marriage
March 13th, 2010 at 11:54 am
Excellent! Thanks a lot!
March 19th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
@Chandan Wow, never imagined a small hack could be so useful!
@Manish @Prathap Aah, didn’t know about iglooo before.
@Alagu Which sites use isbn microformats? I can version the javascript files but how do I get bookmarklets to upgrade (automatically) if they are hardcoded with the version number?
@Shankar @Kartik @Vikas You guys are most certainly welcome, please do send me feedback on how you use the bookmarklet
@Sashank It is NOT meant to be a search engine, that is a completely different level of problem… Can I access isbn.org for free?
@Sriranga LandmarkOnTheNet does not allow searching of books by ISBN, so unfortunately we cannot include it.
@Harpreet Thanks for pointing that out, hadn’t seen it. It’s a funny response because that kind of data is not available unless they are willing to publish their internal fulfillment records
April 19th, 2010 at 4:04 pm
Wow, this is great.
BTW, it doesn’t quite work on books that are pre-ordered.
Rahul
April 19th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
@Rahul Thanks for the compliment. Can you give me some examples of where it doesn’t work, I will try to fix it.
April 20th, 2010 at 12:17 pm
It isn’t working for me since Sunday (18th April, 2010)
I was looking @ this ISBN – http://isbn.net.in/0070635935
it worked for the same book on Saturday.
I tried few other books but its working for none.
but interestingly, the book which is given in your intro page @ isbn.net.in, its working > http://isbn.net.in/0805091742
I hope you resolve the problem soon if its at your end coz I’m lovin’ it
April 20th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
@Avinash Fixed! Sorry, I broke that part when I added Kindle pricing, but it should be working now. Please check.
April 22nd, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Sometimes, the same book with higher price is shown as a cheapest representative of a particular book site.
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:54 pm
@Samyak Can you please provide instances of this? If I can reproduce the problem, then I can fix it.
May 2nd, 2010 at 6:44 pm
Excellent! I’ll use it every time I need to buy a book
P.S: I noticed for some books, prices vary a lot over short periods in time. In my case, prices dropped by 30% or so (in a week) after i bought the book. Maybe a good idea to have notifications of price drops? Worth a thought
May 3rd, 2010 at 10:21 pm
@Sharath Glad you like it, it’s a dirt-simple but useful hack
Interesting idea, I’ll see what I can do!