While iPads, Kindles, and Nooks are grabbing headlines, for the 97% of readers who only buy paper-bound books, there is now a much faster, easier, and kinder way to save money buying books online. www.BargainBookMole.org has just released free browser add-ons for Firefox and Internet Explorer. What makes these “next generation” shopping add-ons different is that they let buyers search for the best book prices on the web exactly when they want to: on the fly, anywhere online while reading details about a book.

Here’s how the add-on works: it’s invisible–unless it encounters a book ISBN  (an unique identifier for each book edition) which triggers a wee pricing tab to discreetly appear. Click on the tab, and the pricing mole quickly digs through all the major book-selling websites to find the best used and new prices (including shipping costs) in seconds. Move away from a book page and the little book-mole tab disappears back underground. For screen shots or a two-minute video showing the Bargain Book Mole in action, go to: http://www.bargainbookmole.org/download

Of course, price isn’t everything. The Bargain Book Mole also lets readers review the details of a book’s condition without having to visit the site where the book is sold. And, buying a book via the Bargain Book Mole does a small good deed: for every sale, 5% of their commission fee (which is paid by the book-selling websites; it’s always free for users) is donated to nonprofits, such as the Author’s Guild, libraries, literacy efforts, and environmental causes. This means even used-book sales benefit writers and the larger community.

Before the Bargain Book Mole was developed, comparing book prices online required finding a new website, typing in (or copying and pasting) the title or ISBN information and hitting the search button. For example, consider a search for a Laura Ingalls Wilder classic on Bookfinder.com, the most popular book-price comparison website. Searching for Little House on the Prairie takes 22 seconds and brings up 46 choices that have Little House on the Prairie in the title. After choosing a title, Bookfinder takes another 23 seconds to get pricing results, for a total search time of around 45 seconds. Add in 10-25 seconds for switching websites, typing in and choosing a title, and a single book price search takes more than a minute. Compared with driving to a bunch of bookstores, this is still incredibly fast, but the same search with a Bargain Book Mole add-on takes only 3 seconds and without the distractions of switching to a new website or double-checking if the right edition was chosen. (The same Little House search on the www.BargainBookMole.org website also takes a few seconds, making it up to 20 times faster than BookFinder or AddAll.com, the two most popular book price.)

In short, the Bargain Book Mole is the fastest, most convenient, and kindest way to buy the best-priced books online. It’s easy to understand why before its official release date and with no publicity, the Bargain Book Mole is already receiving the most downloads of any Firefox book-buying add-on.

Further fact:
- The initial download of a Bargain Book Mole add-on only takes seconds, but for the first use requires restarting your browser.

After much more work, snafus, and tending to details than I care to think about, I’m delighted to share this website with you and especially our “crown jewels,” the free Book Mole browser add-ons (for both Firefox and Internet Explorer).  What we’ve developed is simply the best way to search for book prices online: faster, more convenient, with more information, and even kinder to boot (we’re donating 5% of anything we earn from affiliate commissions to non-profit causes supporting literacy efforts, environmental groups, and the Authors Guild). And in true web fashion, these nifty little “products” are absolutely free to use. Call us MegaloMoleiacs [sorry], but we think these fall under the proverbial heading of killer apps.

Now that you’ve arrived, we’d love for you to try us out. We’ve worked really hard trying to make the website and add-ons as perfect as possible, but there’s nothing like feedback from users. Is there anything confusing on the site or about the add-ons? If so, please let us know. We’re ready to holler to the larger world about our unique site–well especially the add-ons are what are most special.

If you’re a regular online book buyer, you’ll want to download one of the add-ons ( it literally takes seconds to download, and as noted, yes, truly is totally free). If you don’t buy books online yourself, but know a person or people that do, we’d be grateful if you forward our website to book buying sorts (including librarians who could save lots of public money using these tools while also benefitting literacy efforts).
We’ve even made a 2 minute video showing the Bargain Book Mole in action (or if you want an even faster illustration, there are two screen shots which you should take under half a minute to absorb). Both those options are on our download page here: http://www.bargainbookmole.org/download.php

Please let us know what you think, and of course we hope you’ll like it enough to become a regular Bargain Book Mole user yourself and tell others about it (if we have anything to do with it, those who put us on their website, blog, or facebook page will get points for the afterlife).

Thanks for visiting!

WP

Right now, Amazon’s Kindle is lighting the path of bigger profits, lots of media buzz, and higher stock prices. After a brief stock price reversal (courtesy of general economic fears and the runaway success of the iPad), news of the a new, lower-priced forthcoming Kindle  and reports of increased ebook sales, has Amazon’s financial fans raving again. But as we all know the stock market is a fickle place that tends to look forward for about six months (in fairness to market prognosticators, seeing more than that long into the future is a notoriously inaccurate affair, more commonly known as guessing).

So with Amazon on a Kindle-fueled roll, why am I wondering about whether it will eventually bring the company to its knees. First, it’s worth noting that this is a common phenomenon, both in nature and business: the success of an entity or venture often plants the seeds of its own destruction. An obvious example that comes to mind is us. Our species’ impressive ability to dominate nature may well be leading us to our own destruction, either through nuclear weapons or an inhabitable environment. In the case of a business, typically the result of great success in the marketplace is you create a gang of hungry competitors, eager to jump on you and exploit any weakness you might have.

So what is Amazon and it’s pumped stockholders potentially overlooking in their excitement about the Kindle? Namely that the Kindle and ebooks in general have the (likely?<better not use it since we’re talking about the future here) potential to greatly reduce or eliminate Amazon’s competitive advantage.

Consider for a moment what it is right now  that makes Amazon the biggest bookseller on the planet. Well, it’s a few things,  but in the super condensed version they could be boiled down to offering great discounts, very smooth technology, reviews, and great discounts. No, the “great discounts” repeat was not a typo. As much as Amazon user reviews and the pleasantness of the site for book buyers are big factors in their success. Their great prices are a huge part of their competitive advantage. Amazon has the buying power and efficiencies of centralized locations that make it impossible for a large bookstore chain, let alone a mom and pop shop to compete with them. As the cliche goes, they make up in volume what they lose in margins.

Okay, so you’re wondering; what’s the problem? Well, should ebooks become ubiquitous–as Amazon seems determined to make them–their comptetitve advantage that comes from handling real inventory more efficiently than everyone else is gone.  Everybody and anybody with an url and website can offer ebooks. Won’t hardly be nothing to it. This will turn ebooks it about as much a commodity as possible. And in commodity pricing, the distributor and retailer lose big time.

Of course this profit challenge would be irrelevant if the Kindle was the only way to read ebooks, but it is abundantly clear already that’s not the case. So while Amazon may retain advantages from their reviews and user-friendly technology, their mark up will be next to nil since it will only take about a second or two to find lower prices elsewhere or use a handy device like the BargainBookMole’s add-ons to find the lowest prices in seconds. So tread carefully Amazon, the ending of your ebook fantasy of a Kindle dominated world may not have the lovely ending you (or any bookseller) hoped for.

Although Amazon.com was named after the world’s largest river, in many ways it more resembles the jungle that the river cuts through. Despite the website’s clean design and easy customer interface, many a survival of the fittest battle wages on Amazon’s pages–from sellers jockeying for position to hawk their wares, to Amazon trying to grab shoppers attention, to authors and their minion who post, at best, terrifically biased flattering reviews.

These falsey reviews would be harmless enough, if unsuspecting customers didn’t fall into their traps and end up with duds on their hands. So below are some guidelines and tell-tale warning signs to consider before taking a plunge:

• A book has a bad sales rank (a high number), but is filled with lots of incredibly glowing reviews.

Caveats to consider:

-the books’ topic has fallen out of the limelight (say it’s a book on computer software and that software or that version is barely used any more. Then the glowing praise but out-of-sync lack of sales makes sense.

-the book has been around for a while so that the interest and reviews were genuine, but it just doesn’t have a current following.

• The reviewers come from the same area as the author. People tend to know people who live near them. So if a Virginia writer has lots of reviews from readers in Virginia, odds are those were prompted by the author–unless of course it happens to be a guidebook to Virginia or something of like that.

• The glowing reviews are all clustered right around the time the book was released. It’s true most books get the most attention when they are first released, but if almost all of the reviews–especially the really positive ones are near the pub date, then bring out some grains of salt.

• The positive reviews come from folks who have no other reviews or just one or two to their credit. It’s true someone may be so moved by what they’ve read, that they try their hand at reviewing for the very first time. But as my grandmother used to say, a leopard doesn’t change it’s spots (she may actually have said “stripes”, but we’ll assume she meant spots). People who tend to review, review with some frequency and others–such as my wife–never do.
This warning is especially worth noting if there are lots of first time reviewers.

• Last, but definitely not least is to cross-check reviews on other sites that have lots of reviews. The most notable of these are librarything.com and goodreads.com

By www.BargainBookMole.org

Tradition and years of college study seminars has it that the best way to really read a book is to mark it up: underline quotes, turn in corners, write in margins, and highlight paragraphs that must be remembered. There is some wisdom to this: it’s the sensory interaction with the pages that help us better remember challenging material, which is why experiments show students prefer actual books to the eBooks (see forthcoming blog on some things to reconsider about eBook readers). But there is an even better way to make notes.

The Bargain Book Mole “method” evolved initially from my cheapstake inclinations: as a bookseller, I was loath to mark up a book because as soon as you put one mark to a page, you immediately devalue the book. A single marks takes a book from new condition or more likely “Used Like New” condition (which typically fetches anywhere from a few extra dollars to as much as $10-$15 extra when reselling online) to “very good” or more likely “good” condition, at best.

Of course, “make no marks” is an easy enough adage to remember, but it’s harder to live by, especially if you’re a writer or other professional who often reads for research. I needed to make notes and find valuable and interesting passages later.

So here’s what I do: I take a piece of blank paper (or more typically a recycled piece of paper that has something no longer relevant on one side) and fold in half length-wise (see photo). This page serves as a perfect book mark and allows me to make notes to my heart’s content without marring the book. So if it turns out the book really didn’t have too much to offer and I only have a quote or two to write down or perhaps one or two pages to photocopy, I can then resell the book.

If I do decide to keep the book, I actually have a better and easier way to find the material I 
want to recall. This works especially well when I come back to a book months or year later. I don’t have to wonder why I turned down that page. For instance, if pages 119 – 123 have great information on research on memory that I may want to find later, I simply mark down “p119 – 123 Memory Research” so I’ll know exactly where to find it later. What can be a little tricker is what happens when I want to find a short quote or passage that may be buried in a page. I used to use “T”, “M”, and “B” for top, middle, and bottom, but have since found that using a decimal point allows even greater accuracy. So if I want to find a line just a little below the middle of page 142, I’ll indicate “p142.4″ or if the line is about a third of the way down, I’d write “p142.3″. Naturally, none of this is rocket science, but using the decimal point has made finding passages that much easier and I’ve never run across anyone else who uses notes in quite this way.

–www.BargainBookMole.org:  Bargain Book Mole is 15 times faster, 2 times easier, and 5% kinder than the most popular price-checking websites for books–and it’s free. Find the lowest priced used and new books quickly and easily on the fly, from any website. Or check prices via our website. (Find out why we’re the most downloaded Firefox add-on for book buyers [also super fast searches possible right from our website & great Internet Explorer add-on too])

While flossing my teeth this morning (apologies if that’s TMI [too much information]), I wondered: “What’s the odds of writing a Bestseller?” Like anyone else, I did the rational, test-wasting thing and googled it. GOOG immediately came up with some top entries, but the thing is the answers were whacked. The first article was from a site called DivineCaroline, which I’ve never heard of before (but based on traffic there, it looks like I’m out of it);  in that quick piece, along with announcing the odds of dying from a dog bite and the chances of becoming a saint (both 1 in 20 million), it listed the odds of writing a New York Times bestseller as 1 in 220 (posted next to “Odds of dating a millionaire: 1 in 215″).  But that’s crazy. So I dug a bit more, and it turns out that all the top goggle entries had the same stat. And they all seem to be coming from one source (www.funny2.com/odds.htm). In fact, this 1-220 “fact” is quoted up and down the front page results of Google.

Craziness.  I don’t know what the odds are–and don’t have the time to even guess estimate it right now (if you have a good guess/estimate please comment here), but it has to be WAY more than 1 in 220. First of all, according to the New York Times, in 2008, nearly 480,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from close to 375,000 in 2007. Hell, in 1881 (thank you Swivel.com), there were 2991 books published.  So even back then odds were much worse than 1 in 220 (though granted, “‘Bestseller’ is a relatively recent term, first recorded in print in 1889″ –ty Wikipedia).
I’ve come across searches on Amazon that show a book sales ranking over 7,000,000. Even if we figure only 1 in 10 of those authors have aspirations for bestsellerdom, we’re still looking at 1 in 700,000 long shots. And that’s the self-selected few who actual publish, let alone the millions who just dream. Ok enough. But do tell, if you have some way to statistically answer this vague question.

As with any new venture, we’re especially excited about the possibilities of the Bargain Book Mole. In addition to offering readers the fastest, easiest, and kindest way to buy books for less online, we’re also avid readers and interested in creating reader communities and offering readers services To that end, were offering the free Bargain Book Mole review, which you can sign up for and get unbiased reviews of great books selling at deeply discounted prices (to our knowledge this will be only one of the few book reviews to not focus on new titles (which are at their peak price wise), and likely the only book review on the planet to highlight books with bargain prices.

But that could just be the beginning, there are lots of other possibilities, such as creating a meta search engine that searches book websites for content, consolidating blogs of the best writers writing about books and the book industry, developing price moles for other products, offering insights into e-books, etc. Obviously there’s only so much time and energy for such efforts, so the best way for us to know how to focus is to ask you what you want. Adding another community in the post-Facebook post-Twitter world, maybe be a yawn or just sound stressful. So we won’t do it unless you give us feedback that sounds good to you. So please regularly give us feedback/comments about what you think we could do for you!

-BBM

I have long loved Morris Rosenthal’s website, www.fonerbooks.com. Morris is the author of the excellent Print On Demand Book Publishing which is must reading for anyone who is looking to find out more about self-publishing their book/s and his website is a great resource for any book professional. He includes lots of great data on things like how Amazon sales ranking.  For an example of a well researched article on book industry sales statistics go to: http://www.fonerbooks.com/booksale.htm

One would like to think quality matters, and often it does, but at risk of offending 1 billion Chinese, Mao Zedong, was a murderous demon. Probably only a small portion of his books were actual sales (for those who know the comedian Eddie Izzard, think of his routine “Cake or Death?”; in this case was Mao’s book or …

[Source Wikipedia]

Approx.
Sales
(millions) Book

5000    The Bible
900    Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
400    Xinhua Zidian
200    The Qur’an
180    Book of Common Prayer
160    Pilgrim’s Progress
140    Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
120    Book of Mormon
100    And Then There Were None
100    The Lord of the Rings
87    Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (“…Sorcerer’s Stone” in US)
65    Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
65    The Da Vinci Code
60    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
60    The Catcher in the Rye
55    Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
55    Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
55    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
50    Watership Down
50    Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
50    Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Heidi’s Years of Wandering and Learning)
50    The Curse of Capistrano (The Mark of Zorro)
50    Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince)
50    The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
50    O Alquimista (The Alchemist)
45    Charlotte’s Web
45    The Tale of Peter Rabbit
40    Jonathan Livingston Seagull
40    A Message to Garcia
36    Cien A
35    The Late, Great Planet Earth
34    Your Erogenous Zones
32    Westminster Shorter Catechism
30    In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?
30    Think and Grow Rich
30    Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
30    To Kill a Mockingbird
30    Valley of the Dolls
30    The Thorn Birds
30    The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories
28    Gone with the Wind
28    Uncle Tom’s Cabin

If you’ve spent any time checking out our website, and especially our “instant” book price checkers for Firefox and Internet Explorer, you know we offer a faster and easier way to find the lowest book prices online. But as challenging and expensive as it was to develop these tools and this website, getting the word out is proving tougher–or at least a less appealing task to work on.

So what we’re seeking is an experienced web marketer who is excited about what we offer and thinks they can bring us the traffic we deserve (right now we average ~1500 visitors a month). If you’re the right person, we’d split revenue with you. Once we see we can build traffic, there are other ways to develop the site further.

Next step? If you’re interested, obviously first check out the website and especially one of our browser add-ons (the FF and IE add-ons work almost exactly the same, though the FF looks a bit better as developers find FF more flexible/easier to work with than IE). Then send a “resume.” Resume is in quotes, as it doesn’t have to be designed or fancy, it could just be a letter, but it should let us know what you’ve done as a web marketer and point to the websites you’ve worked on. Then send it to Winston Porter at the following e-mail address: BargainBookMole@gmail.com. Also, include 3-6 ideas on how you’d market BargainBookMole. We do have a modest budget for advertising, but prefer to focus on free or very inexpensive methods.

We look forward to hearing from you, and one hopes working with you!
Winston P