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There was a story a few years ago about Amazon charging people different prices on the same items based on the customer's geographical location.

You can use this site to compare prices on books, cds, dvds ..etc across site, with the cheapest price on top. The information includes shipping costs:

http://www.bestbookbuys.com/

You can also blow your cookies and see what the prices are before you sign into your account.

These guys are sort of a consolidator of other sites. I use them for books - enter an ISBN and they'll tell you the price with and without shipping at several dozen online stores. Very handy. They also list prices on electronics, music, movies, and bikes(??).

Try bestbookbuys.com, it compares the prices between online bookstores and it takes into account the shipping/tax cost as well if you input your zip code. And no, Amazon is not always cheaper because of shipping.

What follows is a pretty good list for buying books. The top ones are pretty much 'bots such that by the time you get to Amazon, BN, and Half, you'll have already seen the prices as part of the 'bot output. Also, it builds in any discounts, coupons, and shipping. It's also handy for providing retorts in the discussions when people say, "Amazon's cheaper!" or "BN is cheaper!" because they only check those two sites.

BookPool
AddAll - Compare & Shop
Best Book Buys - Compare many sites & Shop
Barnes & Noble
Amazon
Half - mostly used books

Sounds like the service I used all through school (which saved me around $70/semester, which I immediately blew on several cases of Mt. Dew): http://www.bestbookbuys.com/ - they also have links to the current "new user" codes at buy.com, etc. I think I've used probably used 20 new throwaway addresses at buy.com... :)

http://bestbookbuys.com (compares prices for books accross most online bookstores)
http://consumerreports.com (untainted consumer information, subscription required)
http://edmunds.com (a good read before you buy a car)
http://insweb.com (cheap online insurance agency with a number of insurance providers)
http://www.ftc.gov (to learn your rights as a consumer or as a business)
http://forums.ebay.com/db1/forum.jsp?forum=107 (scams performed on Ebay -- good read for Ebay newcomers)
http://resellerratings.com (to check the track record of electronics resellers, some of the cheapest electronics resellers are one-fly-night operations that take your money one day, go bankrupt the next, and restart the day after under a new name)
http://pricewatch.com or http://pricescan.com (compares prices on pc hardware and electronics)
http://techbargains.com
http://bottomdollar.com

I usually pull up bestbookbuys.com to see about the best prices. This book shows up for $23.90 at half.com...

Before the morons start quoting prices from B&N vs. Amazon, let's remember there are more than those two online. Try shopping at AddAll. It's a shopping bot for books. Prices: Overstock: $21.99, BooksAMillion: $27.44, Amazon: $27.93. Switching to BestBookBuys we get BookPool at $22.50, along with (click for the results, see Amazon in 5th place!: results. And finally, we go to BookPool with a price of $22.50. Now, can we quit using B&N and Amazon ONLY? Jeez. http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/search?isrc=b-hom e-search&q=1590592344&t=ISBN&x=16&y=13

...why does anyone look at Amazon and one other store? You'd think there are two book stores online. Try looking here: For a full readout of BestBookBuys' listing on this book (specifically)

There are three good urls for book shopping:

BookPool, AddAll, BestBookBuys. Why not let bots do your shopping? And if you like the newer bots, check out Froogle.Google

Godel Escher Bach, The Mind's I, Fluid Concepts and Creating Analogies, or if you are adventurous and don't mind getting headaches from thinking about things, Metamagical Themas.

All his books from Amazon , but I would go to best book buys to find the best prices on them.

My wife has read Le Ton Beau De Marot, and she loved it. She has her masters in French Linguistics, and found this book in the bookstore at the same time that I found Metamagical Themas. We were kind of surprised when we went to check out and found that we had found books by the same author in different sections of the bookstore. Hofstadter is a very smart and interesting guy, and writes some awesome stuff. I think that GEB is a must read.

...boycott them because it will save you money.
http://www.bestbookbuys.com/ (Book Price Comparaison Bot)

Have a look at Best Book Buys. They've got pricing for most books both new and used. Searching for Design Patterns currently shows a book for $35 used and $45 new.

half.com - $23.00
bookpool.com - $24.50
Barnes and Noble ... $31.96

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

I avoid Amazon, 'cept I keep my book wish list on there so that friends & relatives can see what computer books I want, and then they go somewhere else, like here to find the best prices, usually not Amazon.

I love features that I don't have to pay for. Yeah, yeah, Amazon knows my personal preferences, and they even send me notices about new books that are like those on my list, but they still don't get my money.

Instead of AddAll, I prefer to use BestBookBuys. Both AddAll and BestBookBuys appear to have similar functionality (for instance, they both identified BookPool as having the lowest price), but I personally prefer the interface on BestBookBuys.

But, I do share your sentiment about Fatbrain. Sure, it used to be independent and cool, but now they're just yet-another subsidiary of Barnes & Noble (bleh!). Besides, Fatbrain also costs $18 more than the lowest AddAll/BestBookBuys price.

Alex Bischoff

I've run most of my purchases through http://www.bestbookbuys.com/ It'll point you to several sources for that title (search by author, title or isbn) along with estimated shipping. More often than not, bookpool.com turns out being the most affordable. I've never had any problems with them. YMMV. -Bill

I'm in the awkward position of agreeing with your point that technical professionals often do things without thinking, while believing your specific example to be crap. The number of hours of labor required to produce, say, a pair of socks has declined dramatically over the last few hundred years. Do you really think that people worked shorter hours and had a higher standard of living two hundred years ago? No, they had two pairs of socks instead of the 12 that I have, and they worked 12-16 hour days 6 days a week, instead of 40 hours like I do. A pair of socks is what, US$1? For a professional, 2 minutes of work, for someone earning minimum wage, 12 minutes. A person in pre-industrial times would have to shear the sheep, card the wool, spin the yarn, and knit it into a sock. Just carding the wool for one sock takes more than 15 minutes! Now, cotton is harvested by machines, carded by machines (remember the cotton 'gin?), spun by machines, and the sock is made by machine. Result: you get a sock for a tenth the labor it would otherwise have taken. Now, we like having luxuries such as multiple pairs of socks, so we buy a ten times as many socks, cancelling out the labor savings. Fine, if that's your choice. But don't complain that you haven't gotten anything. If you wanted, you could get by on a couple of pairs of socks and work only a few hours a week as a freelancer. Sure, the people who used to make socks by hand lose their jobs, but they also get the benefit of cheap socks.

My great-grandfather was a cooper. I'm only in my early twenties, so this was not that long ago, perhaps in 1900 or so. He made barrels for a living, back when people put flour and things like that in barrels. Guess what, there are more efficient ways of storing things than putting them in hand-made barrels with hand-bent slats and hand-hammered hoops. So eventually manufacturers started putting things in plastic drums and cardboard boxes, which reduced the cost of the items. My great-grandfather no longer had enough business to keep on making barrels, so he became a farmer. And I believe lost a bundle speculating on the price of wheat during WWII, but that's another story.

As for a more contemporary example of misapplied technology, one need look no further than the US Interstate Highway System. It was designed by civil engineers who made decisions based solely on the most rigid engineering principles: Build the least expensive highway through a given area. If that meant hacking a black neighborhood in two because it was the cheapest right of way, so be it. If it meant building a highway right on the flat area next to a river, separating the residents of a city from its natural beauty, fine. And if it meant building 70 feet away from homes, shaking them apart and driving their occupants crazy with the noise and vibration, that was fine too if it was the cheapest way to build the highway. The engineers didn't stop for one second to think beyond the blueprints to the effects on the community. They thought that good highways would *stop* the flow of people out of the cities, for pete's sake! Just goes to show that "can" is not at all the same as "should".

Walt

P.S. For a great, very readable book on the building of the Interstate Highways, see _Divided Highways_, by Tom Lewis. BestBookBuys.com has a great price search here. This book is a must for any technical person who wants to consider their impact on the world around them.

You really should read Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got That Way before you go off and publicly get your knickers in a twist about American versus British pronunciations of English. The "purity" of many of these Britishisms is somewhat suspect, to say the least.

Also, its important to understand that there are two significantly different methods comparison sites use to obtain prices. Sites such as BestBookBuys perform a real-time search, and are therefore going to be the most accurate. Other comparison sites, like shopping.com, or mysimon.com compile records daily, and are not real-time searches. Their data is more likely to be incorrect, however since it is all in their own database, you get a faster comparison.

Real time searches should not be affected too much. Amazon is likely to be taken off of these if the real time search doesn't match their price. It won't matter a whole lot if that happens because people who comparison shop for prices already know the best price is not going to be from amazon.com.

If amazon.com doesn't work well with comparison sites its their loss. Amazon's biggest mistake is that their business plan calls for them to dominate selling on the web. That part of their plan is backfiring as more and more businesses are figuring out how to play the web game. We will end up with a great variety of stores to choose from, and consenquently, sites that analyse the great variety of choices will be popular.

Comparison sites are here to stay. If Amazon refuses to cooperate with them, oh well. There are always the 100 or so other stores in any given category that a comparison shopper can choose from.

PS Though it was mentioned that you can buy "Free For All" at ThinkGeek, you can actually get it cheaper elsewhere.

Alex Bischoff
Interested in building a roof over your cubicle?
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Don't buy a book without checking out BestBookBuys.com, a website which automatically compares the price of a given book at 29 different online bookstores. No I don't work for them ...

New Rider's MySQL $29.25

UPS Ground ($6.73)
UPS 3 Day Select ($8.60)
UPS Second Day Air ($11.10)
UPS Next Day Saver ($22.25)
UPS Next Day Air ($24.75)

You're looking at a minimum of $35.98.

Do some comparison shopping first at Best Book Buys before you decide.

BTW, the ISBN listed at ThinkGeek is incorrect. As the /. article states, it should be 07357-0921-1.

If you do want to save money, try bestbookbuys. You can price shop for any book. I suggest we leave price comparisons to these guys and keep the discussions to the books in question.

Disclaimer: Pinball Wizard is not affiliated with slashdot in any way and does not speak for them.

For us at least, its just a matter of wanting an equal playing field, not preferential treatment because we are a smaller business. And in reply to those that assume that the smaller stores will have higher prices, well, all I can say is we get a lot of traffic from bestbookbuys.combecause our prices are often the best - without a big advertising budget, this is one of the few ways we can get exposure.

March 18, 1998, Tarrytown, NY - The American Booksellers Association (ABA), on behalf of itself and more than 20 independent bookstores, announced today that it has filed an anti-trust lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against Barnes & Noble and Borders. The suit alleges that these large, national chain stores are using their clout with publishers to obtain secret and illegal deals and preferential treatment. The lawsuit further claims that these illegal deals put independent bookstores at a serious competitive disadvantage and pose a threat to their survival and to the diversity of American bookselling. The suit contends that these illegal dealings come in many forms, including soliciting special discounts on both large and small orders, the granting of more favorable promotional advertising terms, threatening large returns to obtain extra discounts, and other illegal dealings. Further, the suit alleges that these activities violate a federal antitrust statute, the Robinson-Patman Act, passed in the 1930's to protect small and independent retailers from unfair competition by chain stores. According to lawyers for the plaintiffs, this is the first time a group of independent businesses and their trade association have used this anti-trust statute to fight back against large, national chain stores.

1. Browse for the book at Amazon. Use the nice pretty catalog.
2. Find a book. Copy its ISBN number.
3. Go to BestBookBuys, and paste the ISBN number.
4. Get the book cheap!

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By the way, I have yet to see a book listing on BBB where Amazon's name isn't all the way at the bottom of the lowest-to-highest price list.

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Or, better yet, check out Best Book Buys, and you'll find that Amazon's nearly always last.

You can use bestbookbuys.com to find an even cheaper copy.

You can use bestbookbuys.com to find an even cheaper copy.

I definitely agree with the standard answers of Heinlein, Herbert, Asimov, Niven, Stephenson, Gibson, etcetera. One book I really enjoyed recently was The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.

This book claims to be a sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and has a similar feel.

Baxter's books tend to take on a cosmic scale which may be overwhelming to some readers. He also likes to use a LOT of science in his SF - if you find yourself leaning towards SF with multiple timelines, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, evolution, dyson spheres, and quotes from Godel, this might be something you would want to check out.

I definitely agree with the standard answers of Heinlein, Herbert, Asimov, Niven, Stephenson, Gibson, etcetera. One book I really enjoyed recently was The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter.

This book claims to be a sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, and has a similar feel.

Baxter's books tend to take on a cosmic scale which may be overwhelming to some readers. He also likes to use a LOT of science in his SF - if you find yourself leaning towards SF with multiple timelines, quantum mechanics, nanotechnology, evolution, dyson spheres, and quotes from Godel, this might be something you would want to check out.

Prices for this book range from $23.92 (Buy.com - out of stock) to $33.90 (Borders.com) (both are UPS ground prices).

It's saved me a few dollars, now and then.

Jeff

A foundational part of XP is the mutability of code: you write the code for what you know now, and be willing in the future to totally change it. One of the best technical books I've read recently discusses the how-tos of this: "Refactoring" (by the way, the link directs you to a price comparison site which I find REALLY useful).

I tried to use this method is my latest project, a test framework, and I was extremely pleased by the results; not only did the design morph as I discovered the requirements (so the final result was a design I was pleased with), but the final result snapped into place around the item being tested and no bugs have been discovered in it!

I can highly recommend at least that part of XP: refactoring and coding for today. I'm going to try some of the other parts in small bits at a time, but from what I see they look very useful.

I certainly wouldn't describe XP as being for someone who doesn't have time to design; I would describe it as something for someone who doesn't expect to get it right the first time, and who wants to get it right anyhow. I would also describe it as being for someone who wants to be useful to customers without hurting his own productivity -- see the Bill of rights on the Extreme Programming website. In short, XP is about never having to tell a customer that you can't make that change now -- and it's also about always being able to make changes when you need to.

-Billy

And if you think about these sites, they are strong evidence, that Amazon will never be very proitable - the competition on the net is just too strong (on-topic again!).

Best Book Buys
BookFinder.com
BestBookDeal.com
BookBlvd.com
DealPilot
BESTeDEAL.c om

Some links (which are not normally supposed to be bookmarkable, I guess) may become broken. Pick your favorite, and try them out with books that you're looking for in the future. Now all we need is a meta-meta-book search and you'd be set for sure!

Someone mentioned Best Book Buys; for your information, DealPilot (formerly Acses) has a similar service. More interestingly, they also have an Express version, which hooks into your browser, searching other sites for whatever books (or movies) you select. It is a beta, and it doesn't let you add multiple books (yet).

Whenever you plan to buy a book online, it's a good choice to check on Bestbookbuys.com because they do a price compairison between 25 book sites (including shipping). The best feature I found was on the front page there's a listing of daily hot deals from the book stores. For example, here's the book being discussed and when you subtract the $10 discount on a purchase over $10 from BUY.COM, the final price (with shipping) is $21.66. Not a bad deal.

- Jeff

Whenever you plan to buy a book online, it's a good choice to check on Bestbookbuys.com because they do a price compairison between 25 book sites (including shipping). The best feature I found was on the front page there's a listing of daily hot deals from the book stores. For example, here's the book being discussed and when you subtract the $10 discount on a purchase over $10 from BUY.COM, the final price (with shipping) is $21.66. Not a bad deal.

- Jeff