Introducing Inkmesh

[Sparrow]

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

We're all behind you and wish you total success with your new site which will be of benefit to us all.

Hear, hear! - well said Lady Blue.

[ahi]

If there is no better way to get the info from the Hungarian Electronic Library, here is a link to their full listings in 73 eminently parsable HTML pages.

Do you guys have any idea when you would start adding results from this and the other recommended international eBook websites? I love your website, but I'd use it more if it included results from more international sources.

- Ahi

[anurag]

Lady Blue, it was easy responding to all the other replies, but your post has left me at a loss for words. All I can say is thank you - all of us here at Inkmesh are deeply touched.

Sparrow - thank you once again - there is a lot of work ahead of us, but thanks to everyone here at MobileRead we know that we are headed in the right direction.

Ahi - that's a great link, easy to crawl and parse. Thank you, we have added it to our list. We can't give you a definite timeline for adding international sites, because we want to add some of the more requested features first, and we're not sure yet how long they are going to take. Having said that, you should start seeing more sites on Inkmesh in the coming weeks. We will also post all site additions and feature enhancements as @inkmesh on Twitter (http://twitter.com/inkmesh). So, stay tuned and do let us know if we can do anything else to help!

[jon@outpost19.co]

I second all the kudos on the simplicity and scope. Inkmesh is a huge step forward!

I run a site with a very editorialized approach, promoting books tied to recent news and headlines, and doing it in a corner bookshop kind of way. Very niche and subjective. The other end of the spectrum from the Inkmesh search service... (http://outpost19.com)

But Inkmesh has been missing! It's an essential core service, one that I hope publishers pay attention to. Definitely looking forward to the Inkmesh evolution!

- Jon
jon@outpost19.com

[JasonB]

This is excellent.

I saw that my idea of being notified on the arrival of a new book by a particular was already listed - so I voted for it.

I added another suggestion to the list there, but will mention it here too. Links to the physical versions of electronic books. Often, there are no reviews for the electronic versions - and the physical versions copyright date is much more frequently meaningful than the electronic copyright date, something I often look up - so being able to get to the physical book quickly would be nice. I'm not sure how this would be implemented - but I typically go to Amazon to look up the physical book equivalent of anything I plan on buying electronically.

[unicorn23]

Originally Posted by Lady Blue

anurag,

...you're pleasantly considering and/or acting on each one with a very enthusiastic attitude and welcoming each comment with a totally open mind and good nature.
... responding to each and every poster individually throughout this thread. It shows your commitment to your project and your sincerity that no comment is trivial or insignificant.

We're all behind you and wish you total success with your new site which will be of benefit to us all.

Hear, hear. Class act, guys. Don't know why the big players can't work out that engaging with your user community (a) wins good will and (b) nets some (perhaps many) potentially useful suggestions. Well done.

[josepinto]

Hi,

1.I noticed than when a Baen book was first published as an ARC (Advanced Reader Copy) the same book appears 2 times on search: one is the book published on webscriptions, the other the same books as an ARC.

2. Can you index all the Baen free books that are part of the Baen cds copies located at http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/ ?
The cds are freely distributable but i do not know if it is legal to index the copies of the cds. Check http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/0...rientation.htm

3. French book sites:

http://www.ebooksgratuits.com/
http://www.numilog.com

4. Out of curiosity, how do you pretend to monetize your work? Will you accept donations?

Thank for your excelent work.

José Pinto

[CharlieBird]

anurag, You really do have a great site. I third all the kudos on the simplicity and scope. Lady Blue pretty much said it all.
I especially like your Feedback Formum. I frequently have a terrible time finding my way around forums--usually end-up just giving up.

I did skim (emphasize skim) through all 7 pages and saw nothing touching on if you or how you want to be notified of missing books. This morning I added 7 books to my Fictionwise "wish list", four of which you had listed but not at Fictionwise. The other three were not listed at all.

Not only bookmarked Inkmesh but put in on my toolbar.
d

[anurag]

Jon, outpost19 looks extremely interesting, and while it is at the other end of the spectrum from Inkmesh, we agree that both kinds of services are equally important. Thank you for your support.

Jason, we saw the comments on our own feedback forum as well. Alerting would be a great addition, and we will give it high priority when we introduce user registrations. As for physical book links, I am surprised more people haven't asked for them yet, because we think it would be useful to have physical book results not just for comparison, but also when a title is not available as an ebook. We are thinking through this one, but we'll definitely figure it out.

unicorn23, thank you. I think it's harder for a lot of big companies to be as responsive and involved in the user community because of the number of layers between developers and end users. Fortunately, there's just two of us here at Inkmesh. We're both developers, and we're both Inkmesh users too!

José Pinto, you are very welcome, and thank you for the site links. We will check them out. Regarding Baen ARCs, I can see how most readers might not want to see ARCs, but we chose not to make that decision for users; we index everything we find in the Webscriptions catalog. As for monetization, we truly appreciate your asking, but we don't plan to ask for donations. We do use affiliate links on some of the sites we index, but we suspect at some point we will have to generate revenue through other means to sustain development. We have a few ideas, but fortunately right now we can afford to push them out a few months and focus all our energy on making Inkmesh more useful.

CharlieBird, thank you! We're glad you find Inkmesh useful. Regarding the missing ebooks from Fictionwise - we would really appreciate it if you could drop us an email (team@inkmesh.com) with the titles. We will get back to you as soon as we figure out why they are missing from our index.

[unicorn23]

Hi Anurag,

Taking JasonB's idea re comparisons one step further, if you want to have a look at how someone in the p-book world handles it, have a look at The Book Depository (http://www.thebookdepository.co.uk). When I'm buying p-books (which isn't so often any more), this is the place I normally go.

The Book Depository links to the Amazon UK site from each title record, and put live price comparisons from Amzon onto their records. Their theory is that they're not necessarily in competition with Amazon, but rather that their services are complementary.

If you want to see how someone in the p-book world does it well, I think that you can't do much better than to have a look at their example.

Cheers
: )

[anurag]

unicorn23, that's a great example - thank you for the link.

We have a couple of updates -

You can now search specifically for words in the title or author by using prefixes. We will put a UI on top of it soon, but for now, here are two examples:

Ebooks about Jane Austen: http://www.inkmesh.com/search/?qs=ti...jane+austen%22

Ebooks by William Faulkner: http://www.inkmesh.com/search/?qs=au...am+faulkner%22

Also, we added CyberRead to our list of indexed sites yesterday - they have 300,000 titles, and over 80,000 ebooks that we didn't find on any other site we index.

[Deb]

I just went in and experimented with "Jim C Hines" and got only his books. This is a wonderful addition!

Required gush:

[Surfergirl]

Just to say that I think Inkmesh is excellent. However, when searching for J R Ward's latest book (Covet), you are only showing it as available at the Sony store, when it is actually available at Sony, Kindle store, Mobipocket.com and BooksOn Board.

Keep up the good work!

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

anurag, are you interested at all in indie authors who might want to be included in your listings? Not every author publishes through one of the sites you search... there are quite a number of self-published authors (like myself).

[ahi]

Perhaps inkmesh.com could work from two website lists... one of large eBook repositories that should be recrawled fairly often, and one of smaller eBook offering websites whose offerings change far less frequently and which could be crawled less often (but which would massively outnumber the larger websites in the long term).

I think it would add great value to inkmesh!

- Ahi