Ebook search engine

December 5, 2009 8:52 AM

Inkmesh ebook search engine will search across these sites finding free books and comparing prices. Video.
posted by stbalbach (13 comments total)

LibraryThing recently added a feature similar to this but it doesn't have as many sites (notably no Amazon or Audible). These are some of the first attempts to systematically catalog the fragmented and quickly expanding world of online ebook vendors, services and formats.
posted by stbalbach at 8:59 AM on December 5, 2009

search.overdrive.com will let you search all the libraries that use the service, some of which you don't need a card/membership to lend from.
posted by carsonb at 9:07 AM on December 5, 2009

This looks extremely useful as I have just purchased a kindle and I love it. Thank you for this.
posted by adamvasco at 9:13 AM on December 5, 2009

... and ebooks you have to pay for, too. That makes it more useful. Your description made me think this is a warez site portal.
posted by lukemeister at 9:24 AM on December 5, 2009

ebooks.addall.com is another search engine, and the MobileRead fourms are a good resource for eBooks/Readers in general (including the handy-dandy device matrix)
posted by blind.wombat at 9:25 AM on December 5, 2009

adamvasco, you might be interested in this post Amazon, B&N and Sony Ebook Price Comparison - comparing the 11,604 top-selling titles available at all three vendors - Amazon wins on price 74% of the time, B&N comes in second place. When I first got my Kindle DX I just shopped at Amazon but now I rarely use it for commercial books, rather to read PDF's from Internet Archive - which BTW won't work natively, have to convert the DjVu version to PDF using freeware tools. Also be sure to check out Calibre which will convert most stuff to mobi (kindle) format.
posted by stbalbach at 9:34 AM on December 5, 2009 [1 favorite]

Hey everyone, I'm one of the guys building Inkmesh (and the author of the ebook price comparison blog post linked above). It's great to know you guys like what we're doing. As stbalbach said above, there's a lot more that we can do to improve ebook user experience as the market matures, and we would love to hear your suggestions on how we can improve Inkmesh and make it more useful. Thanks for giving Inkmesh a try.
posted by anurag at 10:00 AM on December 5, 2009 [3 favorites]

Well, there goes my weekend...
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 12:11 PM on December 5, 2009

This search makes me a bit sad given that these are published for free on the web. Of course, this is within the rules of CC-BY-SA 3.0, and I don't own a ebook reader device. If I had any entrepreneurial spirit, I'd relist them myself at 0.99 cents, but I'm pretty sure there's zero market anyways.
posted by pwnguin at 12:48 PM on December 5, 2009

pwnguin, this problem will go away once we start indexing sites like linbrary.com and http://elibrary.fultus.com/ which have free versions of these ebooks. We're always working on adding ebook new sites, and we're going to get to these sites as well.
posted by anurag at 3:30 PM on December 5, 2009

finding free books and comparing prices.

Finally! I've been having hella trouble figuring out if 0 is less than, equal to, or greater than 0.
posted by DU at 6:26 PM on December 5, 2009 [2 favorites]

DU,

It's too bad that there are different kinds of infinities, but all zeroes are the same.
posted by lukemeister at 8:12 AM on December 6, 2009

If only I had an e-book reader :)

or, if only I could download more time to read them!
posted by rebent at 10:38 AM on December 6, 2009