About our price scraper

In order to display prices to our visitors, we have written a number of custom scripts that "scrape" prices from other sites. The bot runs each time that a user requests a particular ISBN number only if it has not retrieved the same ISBN from a site within the past hour.

For site owners
Our site identifies itself by sending an HTTP User-Agent header of "BookScouter.com Price Scraper". I've tried to make the scraper as simple and efficient as possible.

The script is doing nearly the exact same thing that a regular visitor would do.
It is causing less load on your server and less bandwidth than a direct user because it requests only the required pages, and none of the associated images, stylesheets, or supporting files
Pages are requeseted only when a visitor requests them. We don't proactively index your site

Please Let me know if you have any questions about the scraper.