Is &quot;cheapest&quot; the right objective? Because if that&#x27;s the case, book piracy seems like the clear winner.<p>But maybe we should consider &quot;cheapest with some boundaries&quot;. For instance, we probably agree that bookstores are nice for a myriad of reasons, even if we don&#x27;t frequent them. They employ people in the area, they offer curation and recommendations, they invite speakers and host events, and they help local authors get started. They may offer benefits or profit sharing.<p>But a physical space like that costs money. Experience costs money. Curation costs money (indirectly).<p>I&#x27;d argue that cheapest as a metric undercuts <i>best</i> as a metric. Cheap is one important input to the purchasing decision, but it shouldn&#x27;t be the only one.<p>We have to learn to accept some inefficiencies and some personal inconveniences for the sake of a healthier social ecosystem.

As a German I don&#x27;t have to worry too much about the prices of books. We have Buchpreisbindung <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Buchpreisbindung" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;de.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Buchpreisbindung</a>

While not the most modern UI in the world, addall.com has been around forever and still does the trick well enough for me. Although these days I usually just go straight to thriftbooks because I save money there with the free shipping (on $15 orders) and in the long run for sure with all their perks.

Shout out to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isbn.nu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;isbn.nu&#x2F;</a> which has been online doing book price comparison for 20+ years. It&#x27;s by Glenn Fleishman, better known as an Internet journalist, and is one of the best examples I know of a simple commerce microsite.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booko.com.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;booko.com.au&#x2F;</a> is a great example of this. You search the title first, then you can select the concrete book&#x2F;edition on the next page, then a nice list of options.

Pretty nice as a way of finding non-Amazon places to buy books. I don&#x27;t care so much about cheapest, but I do prefer to support independent shops and authors.<p>Any plans to add e-books, preferably with a filter to exclude those with DRM? (watermarking is fine, but adobe drm requires opening in windows and extracting things with dedrm, such a hassle &#x2F; business opportunity)

&quot;Cheapest&quot; is not in my criteria. When I share book links I always take the time to find the original publisher and &#x2F; or author&#x27;s website and pass that around. Pay an extra dollar, where it is also more likely that more of that flows to the author&#x2F;publisher. It is very easy to do a book search, find Amazon or Goodreads in top results, nice cheap and quick delivery, and just share that around. And helping the utter dominance of Amazon to become even worse.

I wish there were an easy way to look up which charity shops in my area have a copy of a particular book and how much it costs. A lot of them already keep track of who donated each book to them if the donor has made the appropriate declaration for gift aid so they are already tracking individual books. All it needs is a bit of organisation, perhaps, to put all the data in one place.<p>I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;d have a reason not to use such a system if it existed. In a few cases they might be forced to lower prices or fail to sell a particular book but I would guess it would be a net gain for everyone.

This functionality makes a lot more sense as an extension; it saves us the hassle of visiting&#x2F;bookmarking a new site. It also saves you the hassle of building good search functionality, which is quite tricky for books if you are using titles and not ISBNs.<p>We put together an open-source version for this a while back, but it&#x27;s been gathering dust ever since. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpsopiDev&#x2F;extpricext" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;OpsopiDev&#x2F;extpricext</a><p>Anyone with javascript experience should be able to fork this and add niche sites they like with little work.

Funny, that&#x27;s not even my highest priority. I wish I could sort by how big or small they are, if they do anything particularly socially or ecologically responsible or something. I want to spend my money at good, human, responsible places.