[rwillmer]

Thanks to all of you who send me messages saying that this is a useful site, that's really good to hear.

But let me ask those of you who have found problems with the site - please tell me about them! Don't keep it to yourselves :-)

Quick summary of my requests:

1) If you find problems with my site, please tell me (via this forum, my website's forum, my website's contact page, or via private message - I don't care, just let me know if there's a problem!)

2) If you find it frustrating that you have to wait for up-to-date prices from Fictionwise, BookOnBoard or the Sony Store from my website, please ask them to give me a datafeed.

OK, now the longer version....

I find it very frustrating when I browse websites and find someone saying "I looked for Book X on ebookprice.info and the site didn't work for me" or "the website crashed" but they either haven't told me separately that there was a problem; or don't even give enough information in their post to help me work out the problem myself (for example, someone yesterday in this forum who didn't even give the name of the book they were struggling to find).

If you tell me about a problem, I will try to fix it.

Sometimes it takes a long time to work out how to do that - for example, making it clear that a book with one title from one vendor is actually the same book as another one with a different title from a different vendor - but if I know about the problem, it will help me work out how to do it better. (That naming problem is quick to fix for a single book but there's nearly 400 thousand books in my database, and I can't check them one by one.)

Sometimes, it's really quick! For example, someone yesterday posted a message on my website's forum which let me realise that the ebooks.com code has stopped working - basically, they'd changed the format on the website, so the wrong info was being picked up by my scripts. Problem solved within 30 mins, and ebooks.com is now working again (thank you!)

For those of you interested in the technical stuff going behind the scenes: this is a really complicated problem. Some booksellers supply a datafeed so I can guarantee that when you hit the website, if the book is there in my database, the data is the most up-to-date. But even when the booksellers have the same book in their datafeed, there's no guarantee that they'll call it by the same name or with the same author.

For example, "Flight Of The Nighthawks : Book One Of The Darkwar Saga" by "Ray Feist", is this the same book as "Flight of the Nighthawks" by "Raymond E. Feist"? To the naked eye, it's clear it is. But to a computer script, it's not.

Others - for example, Fictionwise, BooksOnBoard (two of the most popular with the best prices!) - don't even provide me a datafeed.

And some have a datafeed available, but the prices in it aren't accurate, they don't match the prices showing on the booksellers websites.

So for those sites, I have to screen-scrape (in a responsible manner!) - but I can't deluge their sites with hundreds of requests a second to get the best response for you, my website's user. For one thing, that's not ethical; for another, if their sys admins are on the ball, they'd just cut me off completely.

If you want to help with that, please contact their websites and ask them to make a datafeed available to me - then I could give you the up-to-date prices for them as soon as possible.

Until then, I'm afraid I will have to queue requests to their website so that I only don't overwhelm their websites with your requests. Which means, sometimes you have to wait.

OK, rant over. Just please let me know if you find a problem :-)

Rachel