[rwillmer]

Thanks for taking the time for such a detailed grumblelist. This is really useful - I plan to take some time in October to sort out some of the major issues, so the more I know about what the problems are, the best use I can make of that time.

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Grumbles about ebookpriceinfo (and these are *my* grumbles; some will be totally irrelevant to making the site functional for lots of people):

1) Incredibly dialup unfriendly. Can use it at work; basically useless at home. No point in having a price comparison website that takes longer to load than going to half a dozen ebook stores separately.

I'll sort this out. I'm rather spoiled with a fairly high speed connection at home, so have forgotten what it's like to use dialup. What speed link do you have?

2) Site in general unfriendly. Hard to tell what it's for; hard to tell what the best format is for searching for books (title only? Title: lastname, firstname? Something else?)

You have a point - I don't give any clue, do I? Can do something about that.

3) Can't search for "1984;" title is too short. Orwell's book is not the only ebook with a name under 6 characters long, just the one I noticed recently.

I've just removed that restriction. It was in place to stop searches like "Bible" from killing the database completely. But I've found a better way to do that.

4) Tends to turn up 1 result per site, even if the sites have multiple versions. (Amazon is prone to having multiple ebook versions, esp. of public domain novels.)

Am thinking about this.

5) Books often listed several times with slightly different name formats. Sometimes Title - Author; sometimes Title - Lastname, Firstname; sometimes Title (Author); sometimes Title by Author, and so on. Each is listed separately.

I know this is because the ebook stores list them that way. Doesn't matter; it still makes it hard for me to compare prices. Understanding the technical issues (and I do, and am very sympathetic) doesn't make the site more useful.

This is the biggest problem I have, and it drives me crazy as a user of the site too. I have an idea about how to fix it, or at least make it better; but it's going to take a while to do it.

6) Would like the site to indicate which ebook stores it searches; this would let me know that if it didn't turn up a book from ebooks.com, there's something wrong with the scrape code, but if it doesn't turn up results from coolerbooks (or whatever), it's because that's not on your list--and I'd know I should mention it.

The homepage lists all the stores searched, do you mean you'd like to see on each book page a list of the shops that this particular book was not found at?

7) Doesn't seem to pull any data from ebook publishers that aren't general ebook stores: Samhain press, Double Dragon, and so on. Not sure if this is something that there's any intention to fix; generally, those books are only available in one place or a small handful of ebook stores, and all at the same price.

If I can get a datafeed from a site, I'll use it. The smaller ebook stores don't appear to have such a thing available, and the few I've contacted directly haven't replied to my emails. If you can contact any stores you'd like to see in my site, and ask them to contact me to arrange a data feed, I'd be pleased to include them.

But hand-crafting the screen scraping for large numbers of small stores, plus the associated queueing resources for handling the scraping is a big overhead if they only have a few books.

8) Would like books to be listed by *filetype* not just *program.* I know some publishers don't make it clear whether their ADE books are PDF or ePub, but mentioning the possibilities would be nice. And it would help newbie ebook searchers know whether or not a particular book is usable on their device.

I've thought about doing this but it ends up making for a very complicated user interface. "This book might be this or it might be that". It's not just ADE, there's the Multiformat ones from Fictionwise too.

I don't want my site to be responsible for saying whether a particular book from a particular vendor will work on a particular device; there's too much scope for getting it wrong.

So I think this will stay in the "nice idea but not viable" pile. Although I always reserve the right to change my mind :-)

Thanks again for the list!
Rachel