Book Price Comparison Sites

I'm a sucker for a commemorative pint glass. That's why I ordered the three used books necessary to get one yesterday during Powells.com's sixteenth birthday celebration. And since you need to reach $50 to get free shipping, I tacked on a few more for good measure. Why put toward postage what you can put toward books instead?

My haul, incidentally: The Teapot Dome Scandal by Laton McCartney, two Jess Walter novels, Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money, Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants (for an upcoming Shrinking Violets book club read), and the out-of-print Pimp by Iceberg Slim.

Normally I'm not so profligate with my book spending. I'm the online equivalent of the folks who show up at 7:30am for a yard sale that's scheduled to start at 8am in the hopes that they'll get to nose around and won't be shooed away while everything is still being pulled out of boxes and set up on the folding table. That is to say, I like a bargain as much as I like commemorative pint glasses.

And when pint glasses aren't being used as bait, I like to hit up book price comparison sites for the book in the best shape at the best price. Here are four that I've found to be quite useful.

BooksPrice

This offers the cleanest layout of all the price comparison sites I've used and has some helpful features to boot. It highlights the lowest "sticker" price and lowest price with shipping. Next to some entries, there will be a little price tag icon — this indicates that there is a coupon that can be used at checkout, and the initial price will be struck through and the post-coupon price provided below it. You can also enter your membership details (for example, Barnes & Noble or Amazon Prime) so that its engine can take into account any perks you might enjoy from those.

Even if it stopped there, BooksPrice would be pretty much a shoe-in for best book price comparison site despite the twee little photos of smiling people propped up on books that get in the way of my shopping. But there's quite a bit more on offer. You can set price alerts for a given book, track the price via RSS, tweet the price, and shop for more than one book at a time without opening new browser windows or tabs because BooksPrice has its own tabbed interface. And there's an automated comparison feature that integrates with your Amazon wishlist. And it does CDs and DVDs too.

BookFinder

After BooksPrice, BookFinder looks pretty stodgy. With options for signed copies or first editions, the search feature (which looks like it was cooked up during the heyday of Netscape Navigator) is slightly more robust. The results page is about as old school as it gets, too, although the basic table layout provides a bit more at-a-glance information about the physical condition of the book (BooksPrice does offer this, but it requires a mouseover) and the whereabouts of the seller.

In a few random trials, I found that BooksPrice managed to deliver some lower prices than BooksFinder, which costs it another couple of points. Speaking from my own personal experience, in the recent past I haven't had much need for BooksFinder, though in its early days (ca. 1997) I used it a great deal. What you get here that you don't get with any of the other comparison engines is the personal touch. This is a site run by bibliophiles for bibliophiles, replete with topical blog entries and an international network of sister sites.

AddAll

I can recall also visiting AddAll routinely in years gone by, and I can't really pinpoint a time when I began using it less often than I once did. No, it's not as sleek at BooksPrice, and it didn't always find the lowest price in my random trials. The search is extremely rudimentary and almost always involves a second step of picking from a much longer list, many of which are duplicate entries with slightly different wording (for instance, some include translator's names or foreign-language versions). Its results table is similar to BooksPrice, though, and manages to fit quite a bit of information (e.g., shipping, ship time, tax, used/new status, etc) in the same amount of space. However, like BookFinder, its search results also included transatlantic sellers, the one area in which BooksPrice seems to come up short.

AllBookstores

Until my discovery of BooksPrice, AllBookstores was my go-to comparison site, and I still invariably check it alongside the BooksPrice results. The overall layout is easy(ish) on the eye, it loads incredibly quickly, it culls offers from international sellers, it has a standalone wishlist (which is sometimes better than Amazon wishlist integration and sometimes isn't), and the results table provides just as much information as the best of the others — including coupon codes. The only thing about AllBookstores that would make the bells and whistles of BooksPrice seem less significant is the membership feature, which, as I mentioned, takes into account your rewards and perks cards at some major retailers.

Because all the comparison sites generally hit up the same booksellers (Alibris, Abebooks, Amazon, Powell's, Half.com, Overstock, and so on) and calculate for tax and shipping (some better than others), the low prices have usually been within a few cents of one another. So, really, choosing any one of the above when book shopping online is going to save some money. But if aesthetics and features count — and they should — then AllBookstores or BooksPrice are worth a look if you haven't discovered them already.

What book price comparison sites, if any, do you use? Is there one that trumps all four that I've mentioned?