Several people have notified me that Barnes and Noble’s pricing was not showing up on the site. It looks like they had changed the design of the site which broke the program that checked on their prices.
That has been corrected now, and Barnes and Noble’s pricing should be showing up correctly now.
I had somebody email me the other day about a cell phone recommendation, and I’m not sure how to reply. If anybody has a recommendation for which cell phone might work best for use while buying books, please comment.
“I am in the market for a new cell phone and would like one that would allow me to scan book isbn #’s. I shop at a lot of thrift stores and garage sales and believe some type of bar code scanner would be very helpful. Could you tell me what I need to look for in a phone?”
I had a user ask me if I had any statistics that showed which of the merchants had offers on books the most frequently. This site records enough data to provide some interesting reports like that, so I took a little while to come up with it.
This graph shows the relative number of times that a vendor had a price for a title. The data goes back to the first of the year, so some of the vendors that were added since then show up lower than they normally would.
Tonight I noticed that I wasn’t receiving notifications about user feedback that was submitted for some reason. It has just been broken for a couple weeks, and I had nearly 30 items waiting to be approved. I’m glad that people are taking advantage of this. You can really get a sense of which companies have problems by reading through some of the messages.
I’ve just added TextbookLink.com added to the site, and it’s displaying their prices now. It looks like their prices are pretty competitive, so if you give them a try, please leave some feedback to let others know how their service is.
I’ve just added BooksIntoCash.com to the site. I also noticed that TextbooksIntoCash.com was previously broken and seems to be working now, so that site is re-enabled.Also, BookEmporium.com had been broken because they had made some changes on their sites, and they are working again now as well.
With those changes, there are now 35 vendors showing up on the site.
I’ve just added pricing from FirstClassBooks.com to the site.
I’ve just added BookTurtle.com as a new merchant. I’ve had a couple of people request this site and their site looks nice enough. If you have a chance to try them out please leave feedback for them.
I was away from my computer for most of the morning and just saw all of the emails about the site being down. After a quick investigation, I found that some of the database tables required to run the site were corrupted. This was causing the home page to show up incorrectly, and the pricing page would show the book detail but wouldn’t display any prices on it. The problem has been fixed now. I’m still trying to determine the cause, but it will likely just be ‘one of those things’ that computers sometimes do. Thanks to everybody who sent me an email letting me know about the problem.