Luzme.com: News, Comments and Requests for Help

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by 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.

Thanks for listening!

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?

Generally, 50.6 is what I connect at. I have a 56k modem. While a few people on dialup have slower than that, most don't. Dialup is the only internet available in some parts of the US (unless they can afford incredibly expensive satellite connections) and in many places in the rest of the world.

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.

There has *GOT* to be a way to search by title and author; currently, searching for 1984 turns up "1 Way 2 C The World : Writings 1984-2006 (Marilyn Waring)" and "Mercedes-benz 190 1984-88 Automotive Repair Manual (John S. Mead)" in addition to Orwell's book (and the combined version of it & Animal Farm, and the cliff notes).

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?

Since people only see the home page once, and probably won't go back to it, a small-text list of the bookstores searched would be nice. A list of "results from the following stores" on each individual book page would also be useful.

Right now, it doesn't turn up any hits for 1984 from Amazon. (At least, not in the three or four named variants I checked.)

Other oddnesses:
It's very strange that it turns up print book prices--especially when it turns up print books with no ebooks available.

Clicking on the "Readers" link gets 9 or 10 blank spots before it shows the hot pink Cool-ER. (Are they spots for the Sonys and Aztak readers? Or Sonys & other colors of Cool-ERs?)

[BookLoverToo]

I saw on the shortcovers.com blog that they provide data feeds for developers. I'm not sure if this is the type of data you need or not, but if it is, it would be nice to provide data for shortcovers.com, since they are now offering ePub downloads. If the data feeds include all the books only readable on the shortcovers app and not downloadable though, I'm not sure if that would be useful or not.

Thanks for all your work on the site!

[rwillmer]

Originally Posted by BookLoverToo

I saw on the shortcovers.com blog that they provide data feeds for developers. I'm not sure if this is the type of data you need or not, ...

Sadly these are just feeds of lists e.g. Top 10 Bestsellers, etc, so not what I'm looking for.

However, it's good to see that they're offering ePub books - I'll see if I can get a proper data feed from them.

Thanks
Rachel

[rwillmer]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

There has *GOT* to be a way to search by title and author;

Done. Let me know of any problems...

Other oddnesses:
It's very strange that it turns up print book prices--especially when it turns up print books with no ebooks available.

Having the print book prices is in response to people asking to see how much extra they'd have to pay to get an ebook :-)

And displaying the print books with no ebooks available is in response to people asking why they can't see any books by John Grisham or the Harry Potter books (where the authors have chosen not to allow ebooks yet)

Clicking on the "Readers" link gets 9 or 10 blank spots before it shows the hot pink Cool-ER. (Are they spots for the Sonys and Aztak readers? Or Sonys & other colors of Cool-ERs?)

Um. No. This was a Big Fat Bug - I'd changed something in the development version and uploaded it to the main site by mistake. Fixed now (although I'm struggling to find online stores who are selling the readers who'll give me a data feed for the prices which is why there aren't many prices there yet, still looking...)

And just in case the man from Astak is reading this, I'd really like to get your readers up on the site, any chance of a data feed?

Rachel

[rft183]

Rachel,
I did a search for the author "Richard Laymon", and only 8 ebooks showed up, all from the Sony store. I know that Amazon has 17 in Kindle format (not that I can use them), so something is going on with your Amazon.com data feed.

Thanks for your site, by the way...

Russel

[JCKobo]

Originally Posted by rwillmer

Sadly these are just feeds of lists e.g. Top 10 Bestsellers, etc, so not what I'm looking for.

However, it's good to see that they're offering ePub books - I'll see if I can get a proper data feed from them.

Thanks
Rachel

Rachel,
Send me a private message with your contact details and I'll see what we can do to get you a proper feed.

Jordan Christensen
Product Manager
Shortcovers

[smurphy]

Originally Posted by rwillmer

Ah! that was *your* search!

No, you had in fact hit a bug in the site there - every time you attempted to go to the book page for "Drawn in Blood", the site was falling over.

An obscure bug - it was caused by one of the booksellers having an utterly invalid character in the middle of the name of one of the other books written by this author. So I've added in some extra error handling to cope with similar cases in the future, glad it's working for you now.

Do please let me know if you find problems in the future - it really helps!

thanks
Rachel

This - is actually - the principle of programming web-pages.
Always validate incoming and outgoing data - from whatever source it comes from. After that - enforce the correct format.
This will help you especially with script-kiddy attacks

[notsure]

Originally Posted by JCShortcovers

Rachel,
Send me a private message with your contact details and I'll see what we can do to get you a proper feed.

Jordan Christensen
Product Manager
Shortcovers

For me, this message highlights exactly why this forum is so amazing.

We have someone doing something which I feel is good for the ebook community at large and an actual ebook supplier willing to work with them to make their portion of it run better.

BTW Mr. ShortCovers, thank you for making actual ebooks available that I can use on my 505. I was sad when I saw your initial offering. I used to spend great amounts of CAD at Chapters and this has gone down tremendously because of my 505. With your new offerings, the revenue stream has started flowing your way again.

[Dr. Drib]

This is now the active thread.

Members are encouraged to ask questions about the site.

Have fun!


Don
(Moderator)

[rwillmer]

Hi there

I'd just like to let you know about some new stuff available at Luzme; and if you're an ebook reader who lives outside of the USA and UK, I'd like to ask for your help.

NEW STUFF

• Looking for free ebooks? Follow @askluzme
• Want to build prices into your website? Try out the API
• USA Today chart with prices
• Bookseller chart with prices
• Beta-testing 'My Watchlist'
• Beta-testing Canada
• Beta-testing Australia

LOOKING FOR HELP

If you're willing to try out new features when they're still under test, and can provide constructive feedback to help me it right, please sign up for the Beta test [http://luzme.com/beta]

If you live in Canada or Australia, please contact me to let me know which other stores I should support; I'll be starting off with Amazon and Apple - what else is out there?

If you don't live in the USA, the UK, Canada or Australia, but you'd like me to support your country, please sign up for the beta and put the country you're interested in in the 'other countries' box. Or just get in touch!

Please either send me email, tweet me at @askluzme, or PM me here in this forum.

Thanks!/Merci!
Rachel

[Elfwreck]

Still missing several books by authors I tried. I searched for ZA Maxfield; got no hits; searched for Z.A. Maxfield & got search results. (Author is listed both ways on various sites.) The book listing is missing several books: St. Nachos, Blue Fire, All Stirred up.

Okay, ZA Maxfield is in an odd field & writes for indie publishing houses; maybe not too surprising that some of those works don't show up. (However, the Kindle versions don't show up on several of them, just Sony.)

I decide to search for another author, one whom I know has regular sales & discounts at her site: Diane Duane. The results are missing some books (Stealing the Elf-King's Roses was the one I looked for), which is available in the Kindle store for $10, and available as the "author's cut" on her site for $6.

Two results with missing data for authors I care about would put this in "don't bother using this site." (Would, rather than does, because as far as I can tell, the searches only turn up books on DRM'd sites or places like B&N that won't say whether a book is DRM'd. So I wouldn't be buying from them anyway.)

I'd love to know if a book has a different price at Fictionwise, Smashwords, AllRomanceEbooks, or the publisher's site; some books are in all of those stores--and the books that are, aren't subject to weird agency "must price the same in all stores" restrictions. With agency pricing, best-price-search engines are a lot less important; it's the indie titles that customers need help finding when they're bargain-hunting.

[rwillmer]

Elfwreck, thanks for the feedback.

It's quite often the case that an indie book won't show up until a short time after you've looked for it; as soon as you start looking, this kicks off various searches - the site is supposed to then update when it finds new info.

I can certainly see most of the books you referred to by ZA Maxfield and Diane Duane showing up.

But I am interested in figuring out how I can support indie authors and bookstores better; do you know of anything like a central registry for indie authors that I could use?

Re: DRM, I've added on the "DRM free" label where I know that to be true; I'll be adding in a filter option to only show DRM-free books once I've figured out how best to do it.

I'm always on the lookout for more bookstores to support, so thanks for those suggestions.

Rachel

[rwillmer]

New @ Luzme: 26 December 2011

I've just uploaded a new release:

• Build Your Own Watchlist
• Canadian ebook stores
• "DRM-free" labelling
• "Kindle-Prime-Lending" labelling

The Canadian stores supported are Amazon, Apple, Google and Kobo - please suggest any others you might like.

Rachel

[rwillmer]

New @ Luzme: 17 January 2012

I've just uploaded a new release:

* Import your Amazon wishlist
* Australian ebook stores

The Australian stores supported are Amazon, Apple, Google and Kobo - please suggest any others you might like.

Rachel