Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Sourcing books

I can't count the number of times I've found a citation for a book that I would like to check out, but can't find it in my university library. Depending on the cost of the book, I'm often likely to buy it outright.

My online resources for sourcing these books have always been fairly limited in scope, however. I'd do the rounds of Indigo, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, Alibris and Powells. If they didn't have them, I'd maybe check eBay but I'd probably just give up.

Then today, while looking for a book on discourse analysis, I stumbled across FetchBook. It is an inventory comparison system for booksellers and has over 160 or so different sources in its crawling system. It will even allow you to put in your country and then will give you a complete price quote for each seller, including shipping, in the currency of your choice. Nice!

This one will be going into my "Frequently used sources" folder in Mozilla.

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