Attention Shoppers!

Rare Books and Bestsellers

All the general-purpose bots have categories devoted to books. Both Bottomdollar.com and MySimon permit you to search by author, title, and format (hardcover, paperback, or audio); and MySimon also lets you search by ISBN number. Besides these do-everything bots, there are a handful of book-specific bots, including BookBlvd and BookFinder.

I shopped for J. K. Rowling's best-seller Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and for an early edition of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. I found that shopping with either the general-purpose bots or the book-specific bots is a breeze if you're hunting for a widely available book (like the popular Harry Potter volume on my list).

But if you're looking for a rare book (like my early-edition Catcher), the general-purpose bots are likely to have a harder time delivering results. Such bots tend to search only major booksellers, which don't carry rare, used, or collectible books.

The Harry Potter book I wanted was available virtually everywhere, and most bots found prices that fell within a couple of dollars of each other. BookFinder, MySimon, and PriceScan had the most hits (17, 13, and 12 respectively). If you want to pinch pennies, check all the bots' offerings. Every price quoted, even with shipping and handling costs included, was a couple of bucks lower than the independent bookstore price from the brick-and-mortar world. As for Amazon.com, the bots found the discount cybergiant all right, but never with the lowest price. Thanks to MySimon, I paid two bucks less for my hardback copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets than I would have at Amazon.com.

As for The Catcher in the Rye, only BookFinder found an early edition--the others found mass-market paperbacks and related publications. Like any other book bot, BookFinder lets you search by title and/or author and to specify hardback or paperback, but it also allows you to check boxes for first edition or signed copy, and used or new; set price limits; select how many results you want per page; and enter extra keywords. If you're picky about the condition of the book, you can use this last feature to limit your search to copies listed as being in fine or very fine condition.

The Right Bot for the Job

BookFinder has three main downsides: It organizes results into seven subdivisions reflecting the seven search engines it uses to look for matches; it cuts off results from any of these as soon as the matches in that subdivision reach 25; and it offers no way to re-sort results (by price, for example), so you have to scroll through all the results to find the best deal.

After browsing BookFinder's matches and losing a lengthy debate with my better judgment, I passed up the $6800 first-edition hardback and instead bought an early edition for $50 plus $5 shipping. For me, the online experience beat the used bookstores in the real world, too: I called half a dozen local shops and none of them had an early edition of Catcher in stock.

If you're looking for a widely available book, you should shop around using the general-purpose bots as well as the book-specific sites. But if you're on a quest for a rare class of book, skip the general bots and go straight to BookFinder. As is the case with most bots and in most product categories, finding shipping costs is up to you.