I have been getting many emails regarding isbn.net.in since I put it out 9 months ago. For example:

Hi Swaroop, I am following your blog for last year. I have visited and used ur isbn.net.in service. It is a good idea.

To easy of mobile phone buyers, I wanna create a application like isbn.net.in for the mobile phone availability and comparison.

Can i do this as a Final year project? Is it take that much work? To create that what should I know!

I have knowledge in Open source softwares, LAMP and basic python (From A Byte of Python).

and this:

Hi Swaroop,

Love your site isbn.net.in!

I am planning to start an online bookstore to sell used books. I need help to acquire book info like title, author etc. based on ISBN. Will you be able to help? Do you have an API that I can use? I see that you use Amazon. I was not sure if Amazon would have the details for books published in India. Please let me know your thoughts. Appreciate your help.

I actually wrote isbn.net.in as a means of learning Ruby, so I had written some hacked-up code using Sinatra. As it was my first Ruby project, the code was very amateurish and was not something I wanted to share.

Since so many people have been asking how it works, I decided it would be easier to just open source it. I took this opportunity to rewrite it using Rails 3 and try out Heroku as well. So, voila, Rails 3, Heroku and using MongoDB for tracking background jobs (to do the screen scraping) means a brand new isbn.net.in that is now live.

And the source code is now at https://github.com/swaroopch/isbnnetin (Note that this software requires Memcached and MongoDB to run).

The code is under an Apache license, so use it as you please.

Now that the source code is out there, there are some contributions that can make the site better:

• Detection of ‘out of stock’ / delivery time
• Detection of extra shipping charges / other hidden charges
• Mobile version
• Any improvements to the web design at all (I suck at UI design)

I would love any help on the above. If you’re interested, please fork away and when you’re ready, send me a pull request on GitHub

Still Spreading

I am surprised to still see the response to isbn.net.in, mainly because I do zero marketing, and yet I still get 1-2 emails per day about it. That is amazing considering that the site has been there for nearly nine months and I didn’t do much other than write a blog post about it. I don’t tweet it or facebook it and all that jazz. I guess it’s a case of “Build it and they will come”?

For example, it was featured in startup articles, it was even mentioned in interviews of new online ecommerce stores that are coming up.

My favorite part is that people are using it as a bookmark URL (which was a use case that I had in mind), see @xrivatsan, @PurpleFoodie and @Shalin10

And I get emails and tweets when the site used to go down for even a few hours!

Oh, and thanks for all the feedback:

Shashank ND says:

“isbn.net.in saves a ton of time when trying to buy books online. Indian e commerce needs more of them. Thank you @swaroopch.”"isbn.net.in saves a ton of time when trying to buy books online. Indian e commerce needs more of them. Thank you @swaroopch.”

Swaroop Hegde says:

“Been searching for Kochan’s Objective-C book for a day now but hitting out of stock everywhere. And oh, Kudos to @SwaroopCH’s isbn.net.in”

Nandan Dubey says:

“http://isbn.net.in/ best site to compare price of the books visit it once before buying any online books”

Vinay says:

isbn.net.in is one simple and great site which is give you the best prices online. Great service for book lovers

The greatest flattery, though, is when it has inspired many other book price comparison websites.

For example, take the story behind mySmartPrice:

I chanced upon a book price search engine by Swaroop through a post on Flipkart. I will always remain thankful for that since I have gained a lot of insight by going through his blog. If you intend to ever start your startup then do subscribe to his blog.

A lot of users of Swaroop’s project liked the product. However many of them were asking for a way to start with the title of the book instead of the isbn number. I guess Swaroop has not made the changes since it was not his idea to start with and he might be busy with his new job at Infibeam. Coincidentally I am on the exit mode from my job to get into the startup phase.

One of the biggest inspirations for working on this project has been my own desire to prove to myself that I continue to be a geek even 5 years after I stopped coding to go to IIM Bangalore. There are many improvements that are required even now and I will talk about them in future posts. However I am already proud of the product that I have.

I will close this post by wishing myself and MySmartPrice luck and by thanking Tapas for introducing me to the wonderful blog of Swaroop and Swaroop for providing me such a nice homework to bring out the coder in me

There have been other sites such as MyDiscountBay that also seem to have taken inspiration from isbn.net.in. Update: confirmed via twitter.

And we seem to be spawning many more.

The irony is that I myself was inspired by isbn.nu. We all stand on the shoulders of giants

Oh, and isbn.net.in is certainly just a side project, definitely not meant as a competition to these startups.

The single biggest crib that I hear is that one needs to know the ISBN number to use isbn.net.in – it seems that most people forget that I have a bookmarklet which solves that problem, sigh. I really don’t see the need to make a completely new search engine when all these ecommerce sites are already putting in effort to make a great search engine. But I guess people want everything online and don’t want to even use a browser feature, such is the Net effect! (If you do have an idea in mind how to solve this, as I mentioned before, fork away )

This was my list of updates about isbn.net.in. Feedback welcome!

Update: Someone has written a Flipkart to isbn.net.in link greasemonkey script. Nice to see people building on top of isbn.net.in! On the same note, if you ever want to get the prices from isbn.net.in, just append .json to the URLs, example http://isbn.net.in/0142000280.json for the JSON data of the prices.

A while back, I released a side-project called http://isbn.net.in – a simple tool for comparing book prices in India. I received lots of feedback, suggestions and praise. I have updated it with fixes for the bugs reported and implemented most of the suggestions.

It was interesting to see people writing blog posts and linking to the corresponding book page on isbn.net.in as a “canonical page” about the book. I hadn’t thought of that.

Feedback

Lots of bug reports, suggestions and praise came via email, such as from Onkar:

“Nice idea with simple implementation. I am sure this will make my father happy. Thanks for your work. ”

And as expected, Twitterers were most vocal about it:

@saurabh says: isbn.net.in is awesome #recommended #ftw #awesomeness

@kranium256 says: isbn.net.in is actually quite bloody awesome!

@kr0y says: For all those who love to order books online, this site can really help you get a good deal http://isbn.net.in/

@abhinittiwari says: Awesome book price comparision engine! http://isbn.net.in/

@vineetmundhra says: A wonderful tool for comparing book prices in India http://isbn.net.in

@l0nwlf says: http://isbn.net.in -> a pretty neat site to compare prices of book

@yarooruvann says: http://isbn.net.in/ very good tool to compare book prices in India

@jasdeep says: isbn.net.in is awesome, thank you @swaroopch

@tan1337 says: Awesome!

And some of the blog comments were heartening to note as well, especially this one:

Chandan V says: 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.

Note that last sentence. That is the stuff that creators love!

Search by title

The biggest feedback was: “Getting ISBN numbers is a little difficult for everyone. Consider taking a book title as your input and searching prices based on that directly.”

I understand the motivation behind this. But unfortunately, this was what I was exactly trying to avoid! I do not want to build a search engine! That is a non-trivial task, as I’m sure you can imagine.

My idea was to piggyback on top of people who are already doing that well. For example, Flipkart and Infibeam are supposed to have the most titles for the Indian market. So my idea was this: Why not use those search engines which are being constantly updated and tweaked by those companies to search for the books, and then use the bookmarklet + isbn.net.in to compare the actual prices. I actually don’t want you to use isbn.net.in as the starting point.

If you still want to search by book title, then head on over to the new Google Product Search for India. The reasons why you would use isbn.net.in over Google Product Search, is that isbn.net.in is comprehensive, accurate, has latest prices (as much as possible), and helps you decide whether to buy the book using the full description and Amazon rating.

Fixes and Updates

Regarding the fixes and updates based on your suggestions, here is the list:

1. Fixed error on multiple pages such as http://isbn.net.in/8190453025 (via @sudhiru) and http://isbn.net.in/0074637762 (via email from Abhinav Sood)
2. Fixing fetching of prices from a1books, thanks to bug report from Amit Sharma
3. Added link to Google Product Search for India, because of many queries to allow search by title.
4. Added CoralHub.com to the list of online book stores that is searched.
5. Linked to iglooo.in and bookase.com in the about page under the list of similar projects.
6. Added a “generic grep” to make the bookmarklet try a little harder for sites that is not known in its default list – IIRC, this was a suggestion by @talonx
7. Bookmarklet now works with Amazon pages, but for this, you will need to take the bookmarklet again from http://isbn.net.in frontpage
8. Added Kindle prices.

Favorite New Feature

My favorite new feature is Kindle ebook prices because, sometimes, buying the Kindle edition is cheaper than getting the paper book. That’s what I did with Seth Godin’s new book.

Further suggestions and feedback are welcome.

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.